Hajime

There's a measured, almost scientific precision to Chef Hajime Yoneda's cooking, and it's no accident: he was a design engineer before he ever picked up a knife, and at Hajime, in Osaka's Edobori district, recipes are documented and temperatures controlled to a fraction of a degree. The food is innovative French in spirit but built around themes of nature, the Earth and the cosmos, served in a hushed, gallery-like room. The dish to know is "Chikyu" — Planet Earth — a single plate of more than a hundred vegetables, herbs and grains arranged to evoke the living world. It took three Michelin stars within roughly seventeen months of opening, the fastest on record anywhere, and has held them ever since. Book the full menu; the short one leaves out the planet.