Unnamed Restaurant #1

⭐⭐⭐

🪵🔥 Wood-fired ✖️ 🇫🇷 French / 📍 Monzen-Nakacho

📓 Visits: 1

One of the hottest new openings of 2025 from the same owner as Watanabe Ryori-mise, a still difficult-to-book French bistro.  I'm choosing not to name it, for reasons I'll explain at the end of this review.

Lunch at JPY 9,000 for 8 courses and dinner at JPY 16,000 for 9 courses.  Ostensibly wood-fired French but better thought of as Tokyo makibi.  Chef Koji mans the grill while head chef Ryunosuke Owada handles all other cooking.

A couple of underwhelming canapes to start.  All featured smoked elements but you'd expect the smoke to punch through a bit more.  7.5/10.  Next hot pea soup, smoked scallop.  A large portion but no deep flavour of peas and the scallop was over-smoked. 7/10.  Up next sawara, buntan, wasabi hana and seasonal green vegetables. The flavour of the fish was drowned out by the buntan and mustard dressing; the green vegetables not notable in quality.  7/10.  A slight improvement with the smoked broccoli risotto.  But the rice wasn't al dente and I believe it was Japanese rice, which you can't make a perfect risotto from.  7.5/10.  The best savoury dish was the perfectly grilled Canadian lobster with smoked cream beurre blanc, smoked milk foam and grilled white asparagus.  The sauce was delicious but the dish was a little salty overall.  8/10.  The main dish was grilled shoulder of pork.  The pork was good quality and the chef did the pig justice.  8/10.  The head chef is from Kashiwa in Chiba so the palate cleanser is Kashiwa turnip gelato with a sauce made from the leaves and a touch of salt.  All together this worked surprisingly well.  7.5-8/10.  The main dessert I scored a generous 8/10.  The meal finished with a choice of drink and a delicious macaron made from the firewood ashes and filled with a white chocolate ganache.  Campagne is toasted over the fire and supplied by Zopf, the most highly-rated bakery in Chiba.

Menus are in Japanese but Koji-san is a native English speaker, and (apart from the Champagne that wasn't cold enough) as you would expect from an ex-Den chef, hospitality was excellent.  The restaurant sits 16 upstairs but all foodies will want to be at the 7-seat counter watching the 7-8 members of staff at work.  They have a third floor which they haven't opened up just yet.

I wanted to love it but I couldn't.  Almost everything is wood-fired so you shouldn't feel short-changed in that sense.  But while there were no truly bad dishes, almost every dish fell short in some way either in flavour, cooking, balance, seasoning or quality of ingredients.  The chef openly admits he doesn't have any experience with wood fired cooking and frankly it showed.

If the restaurant had been open for longer and had a regular customer base I'd be less conscious about publishing a critical review.  I could maybe wait until then before publishing or go back a year later and see if there was an improvement but I'm unlikely to be going back and given the interest in this new opening it gets high priority to publish.  The main reason I started this blog was because I was tired of having poor meals at restaurants that someone had recommended online.  When they don't enjoy a restaurant, most Instagrammers either don't publish or publish and say nothing negative or (worst of all) effuse about a place only to never return.  That makes them difficult to trust.  There's enough room for everyone to have their own opinion about a restaurant but I don't want the first hit on Google for a brand new restaurant with a young and new team trying their best to be a poor review.  But at the same time, I wouldn't be being honest if I didn't publish.  The way I'm going to square the circle is not name the restaurant.  If you want to know the name of this restaurant click on the Tabelog link below.  The objective here is not to hide anything from the reader, it's simply to stop Google from indexing this review under the restaurant's name.

No-one likes to get a bad review but if you are going to put yourself out there then you can't expect uniform praise and I think I've been particularly considerate here.  As I mentioned there were no truly bad dishes.  A Tabelog rating of 3.7 (which is how I have scored the restaurant) isn't bad but it ain't great for a meal that will cost you over 10K and take up nearly two hours of your time.  There might be a more positive sentiment to this review if I'd randomly walked into this place instead of having my expectations built up but it probably wouldn't have affected my score.

I don't plan to make this the default method of publishing less than great reviews.  It's only going to be for cases like this.  And if this publishing experiment doesn't work, I'll have to come up with something else.

📌 https://tabelog.com/...

❓ My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐ 3.7 (food: 3.7, effort: 4.9, service: 4.2)

📱 Booking: 🟧 The restaurant was booked out till June two days after reservations opened and similarly booked out for July.  A new reservation period opens up via TableCheck on the 1st of every month, for the second month following.  No English menu.  English spoken.

📍 Location: 

1-1-3 Tomioka.  1 min from Monzen-nakacho Station Exit 1.  Across the road from Watanabe Ryori-mise.  
Map data ©2025 Google

📶 Free WiFi? ✅ Yes

📅 Visit April 2025

🕛 Lunch 9,000

Smoked sakuramasu tartar; firefly squid, pomme puree, nanohana
Potage Saint-Germain, smoked scallop
Sawara, buntan
Chèvre and broccoli risotto
Lobster, white asparagus
Kinkaton makibi
Turnip ice-cream
Rhubarb, smoked milk sorbet
Tea (or coffee)

💴 Damage: 11,800 (9k + 2 drinks @1800)

⏱️ Time taken: 2h (30 mins quicker if you book a later slot)