Kappo Shintaku

Few restaurants in Japan have the same legacy that Shintaku does. First founded in 1867, the restaurant is an icon of not just Murakami City, but the whole of Niigata Prefecture, boasting over 150 years of history. Over the years, it has picked up a whole series of gourmet accolades: it’s a regular fixture on the Tabelog Top 100 in Niigata, and picked up a Michelin Star in the special edition of the Michelin Guide Niigata in 2020. Most recently, it made the list of the Japan Times’ top Destination Restaurants 2024. Today, the restaurant is owned by the Kyoto-trained brothers Yamagai Shinsuke and Ryota, who specialize in two different parts of the restaurant’s cuisine; the older supervises appetizers and sashimi, while the latter is in charge of simmering and grilling. As is to be expected from a Murakami restaurant, local ingredients are at the forefront of the menus. Murakami is renowned across the nation for its salmon, which are still farmed traditionally with nets in the Miomote and Arakawa Rivers. It is this same salmon that is featured prominently in the restaurant’s winter menus, when the salmon return to spawn in October in December. The Miomiote River also provides ayu sweetfish and huge, creamy Iwagaki oysters for the restaurant’s summer offerings, while hunters bring freshly hunted wild boar from the surrounding mountains from fall to winter. All year round, though, Murakami beef is the highlight: a type of local wagyu beef that can be found only in local Niigata — so small that only about 500 cows are sold in Tokyo’s central meat market every year. These multiple-award-winning cattle roam freely on the windswept coastal plains of Murakami’s shores, and are fed a diet of rice straw, which makes their meat especially sweet and tender. The Yamagai brothers’ close relationship with their suppliers ensure that they get first pick of the finest crops and catch. As is to be expected from a Niigata restaurant, sake is in abundance as well. More than 20 types of sake are served at the restaurant, all of which come from just two breweries in the local region.