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Tokyo's best gourmet meal
Small dishes, but plenty of them. These top gourmet feasts pack all the flavors of multiple meals into one taste-packed sitting
Recommended: Aronia de Takazawa’s prix fixe menu
A priceless Italian tile? Or Aronia de Takazawa's colorful ratatoiulle?
One of the most exciting young chefs working in Tokyo, Yoshiaki Takazawa stages a one-man show every night.
His show-stopping dish is a "ratatouille” of 12 different vegetables pressed into a crunchy mosaic-like terrine.
A single fermented black bean lends a note of umami gravitas to the meal, which includes a creamy yin-yang of cool yellow and white corn soup surrounding a warm mound of kegani crab and nest of shredded pastry presented as a deconstructed crab croquette.
There is no a la carte option at Aronia. Prix-fixe menus consist of seven, nine or 11 dishes priced at ¥20,000 (plus tax and 10 percent service charge). The chef chooses all of the dishes for the evening, but his wife, Akiko, will contact you before your reservation to check if you have any allergies or dislikes.
Hospitality is the cornerstone of the Aronia de Takazawa experience.
Based on the concept of the tea ceremony, the restaurant accommodates only two tables per evening. Takazawa prepares the food, chooses the wine and serves the dishes.
While the restaurant’s style and presentation have generated attention, our panel agrees that the creative cuisine lives up to the surrounding flash.
“The tasting menu is balanced and skillfully paced; proper consideration of flavor, texture and temperature has been given in the selection of each dish,” says Tokyo food expert Melinda Joe.
Joe also raves about a new dish called Autumn Colors, which consists of rare-in-the-center slices of guinea fowl and white liver beneath a scatter of fried beets, pink turnips and yellow potatoes cut into the shapes of leaves.
"It’s delicious and tinged with melancholy, precisely the way we feel about autumn," Joe says.
Open daily, 6-9 p.m. (last order). Aronia de Takazawa, 2/F, Sanyo Akasaka Bldg, 3-5-2 Akasaka, Minato-ku, tel. +81 (0) 3 3505 5052, www.aroniadetakazawa.com
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Best Eats 2010
