Kanda

Tokyo
2022
The brief was to design new premises for a well-established restaurant that has garnered three Michelin stars for fifteen years running. The restaurant’s capacity, of nine counter seats and a single private dining room, remained unchanged, but the design focused on issues such as making the customer area a little more spacious, incorporating a tea house garden, adding an entrance lobby and a waiting area, rationalizing the circulation paths in the cooking space behind the counter and building in a separate entrance for the private dining room.

We used old Kasuga cedar for the all-important countertop. A bold decision was taken to use an old rhomboid-shaped Tempyo-era piece of timber from the Shosoin Repository in Nara as an alcove post immediately behind where the owner-chef presides.

We used diffused surface lighting rather than spotlighting for the counter area to make the food stand out and to emphasize the standing figure of the owner-chef. A large, ancient stone well frame was placed in the tea-house-style miniature garden to suggest the presence of a famous water source. The garden also features an Inari Shrine. Surrounded on three sides by a cedar-bark fence and seeming to float on a long, thin bed of moss, the shrine helps to create a space that has extraordinary tranquility, despite being in the city.

All the furniture in the restaurant is made to order. The counter stools have steel legs sheathed within lengths of bamboo, a conscious nod to the sensibility of Japanese architect Isoya Yoshida. All the artworks on the walls are by Hiroshi Sugimoto and were chosen to complement the space. His Kegon Waterfall, which hangs in a Hinoki cypress frame at the restaurant entrance, emits a cool, powerful energy—energy that flows out into the rest of the space, is joyously welcomed by the Inari Shrine and then streams down into the well in a species of divine transference.

Hiroshi Sugimoto