Les Chanterelles

Tucked into the quiet residential pocket of Motoyoyogi-cho, just a short distance from the bustle of Shibuya, Chanterelle is a place where French culinary memory and the rhythms of the Japanese seasons converge without fanfare. The name comes from a mushroom — the chanterelle — that chef-owner Yusuke Nakata first encountered during his training years in the forests of Auvergne, where he would head out daily to forage in autumn and winter. Unassuming in appearance but extraordinary in flavor, that mushroom quietly became the soul of the restaurant itself. Born in Shizuoka in 1972, Nakata spent six formative years at Shibuya's La Blanche before heading to France, where he trained at Le Bercouil in Paris and spent two years at the celebrated Auberge et Clos des Cimes in Auvergne — now known as Régis & Jacques Marcon. Back in Japan, he helmed the kitchen at Artemis in Harajuku for seven years before opening Chanterelle in July 2011 — driven by a single wish: to cook warm, joyful food as close to the people eating it as possible. That spirit shapes everything here. Each day, Nakata arrives at the kitchen not with a fixed plan, but with a feeling — what he wants guests to taste today, which dish might make a particular wine sing. Since the restaurant's tenth anniversary in 2021, this instinct has become method: trusted wholesalers deliver the finest seasonal catch and farm-direct vegetables each morning, and only then does the menu take shape. The result is cooking that is at once improvisational and deeply rooted. There is a conviction Nakata has carried since his earliest days in the kitchen: that making French cuisine in Tokyo, as a Japanese cook, is its own distinct calling. The France he absorbed — its ingredients, its air, its unhurried relationship with the table — lives in every dish alongside the four seasons of Japan, expressed through the day's finest seafood and vegetables grown by farmers he trusts. Warm food, made close, offered with quiet generosity. That is Chanterelle.