Tokyo
Nakamura
Why we point you here
Chef Motokazu Nakamura is the sixth generation to cook here — a Kyoto kaiseki house whose name means the craft passes to one son, and has for two centuries.
Long before it was one of Kyoto's great kaiseki restaurants, Isshisouden Nakamura was a family of fish-carriers, hauling the catch from Wakasa Bay down the old "mackerel road" into the city. Nearly two hundred years on, Chef Motokazu Nakamura — sixth generation, and the only child entrusted with the family's secrets, as the name "isshisoden" implies — cooks a pure, pared-back Kyoto cuisine shaped by a stretch of Zen-temple training. The restraint is the point: a white-miso New Year's soup made only with well water drawn on site, a tilefish doused again and again in sake as it grills. You eat in tatami rooms in a quiet townhouse, with three Michelin stars held since 2011. Tradition kept alive rather than embalmed.
Accolades
On the map
Other charted spots in Tokyo
Worth the detour.