La Blanche

This Omotesando French restaurant opened in 1986 and has been a favorite among local customers and the city’s restaurateurs, ever since. Chef Kazuhisa Tashiro is well-regarded among the young guns on Tokyo’s French cuisine scene. His is a bistro with an air of maturity and elegance, which many of the trendy new places just can’t match. This is in part because he doesn’t bother with overly fancy plating, which he worries is sometimes just a way for chefs to dress up sub-par ingredients. No such trickery is at play here, where every dish is presented with reserved panache, and the bulk of the talking is done by the top-grade ingredients themselves. The set menu heavily focuses on vegetable and seafood dishes, and you can choose from three different options, at three different prices to suit your budget. Don’t leave without trying Tashiro-san’s specialty: a layered sardine, bacon, and potato dish that resembles a terrine. Plenty of others have tried to imitate it, but none can do it quite like him.