Tokyo Michelin Restaurants | Quintessence

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Quintessence means “essence” or “fifth element” in French. When Mr. Kishida was young, he studied in Paris under Pascal Barbot, the chef of the three-Michelin-starred restaurant L' Astrance, who is the same as Taiwan's famous chef Jiang Zhencheng. In Mr. Pascal's restaurant, you may not find first-class service, and many people even report that the seats are not so comfortable, but this three-Michelin-starred restaurant has its own philosophy of success - the precise handling and use of ingredients and the unique method of continuous flame-broken grilling.

After studying at L'Astrance in Paris for seven years, Kishida returned to Japan and began a new chapter in his career by combining genius imagination with skillful technique. Along the way, whether it's Tabelog's national No. 1 ranking or Michelin's three-star recognition, the baby-faced Kishida has always done his own cooking, never stopping to think about it and refine his skills.

Kishida's success has also made foodies around the world more receptive to French food made by Japanese chefs, and to this day, nearly half of the few hottest French restaurants in Paris are owned by Japanese chefs. A restaurant owned by a seminal chef is worth a special visit.

We dined for four on our trip and were very lucky to have a private room reservation (you are not allowed to take photos while dining in the lobby as it may interfere with other diners). The restaurant's facade is so understated and hidden that it took me a while to find the entrance. The interior reflects Chef Kishida's personal aspirations, with a mix of Japanese simplicity and clarity and French poise and depth, or in layman's terms, understated luxury.

When you sit down, you will see a stone plate with the restaurant's name on it, and then the waiter will bring you the wordless menu that Quintessence is famous for. Mr. Kishida was the first to incorporate the Japanese concept of omakase into French cuisine, pioneering a new school of thought where “what you eat is determined by the best ingredients I can provide on that day,” which is pretty bold, to say the least.

This design on the one hand reflects the Japanese concept of respecting the ingredients gifted by God and eating according to the time of the year, reflecting the intermingling of food cultures; on the other hand, the dishes mentioned in the articles I've read about this restaurant written by several gourmets are different even in the same season. This invariably refreshes your expectations and will make you want to visit again.

Quintessence's wine list is thick enough to warrant three Michelin stars. However, as a layman who doesn't know much about wine, I'd rather leave it to the sommelier to make a recommendation, given the dozens of pages of wine lists and the uncertainty of what's on offer today. I have to say, the sommelier's recommendation of a non-vintage Grand Cru white-on-white Champagne from the popular Champagne house Jacques Selosse was very good, and went very well with the evening's meal.

Vinification-wise, using 100% Chardonnay and blended with base wines from 3 different vintages and aged for at least 3 years, coupled with a strictly limited annual production, it's a small-farmer champagne with outstanding flavors. It's worth saying that Quintessence's drink prices really aren't that expensive by Michelin 3-star standards.

To be honest, it's a bit difficult to talk about French food like sushi at my level of knowledge, so I won't try to show off. What I would like to share are some of the sensations that this French meal gave me. The first thing I'd like to talk about is Kishida's signature - goat's milk BAVAROIS!

This is a dish that uses cheese made from goat's milk from Ruriken in Kyoto, lily root from Aichi Prefecture, and seasoned with olive oil and sea salt. This dish is said to have been inspired by Chef Kishida's home party during his studies in France, and he improved it when he returned to Japan, so the whole dish is presented as an uncomplicated combination of ingredients and cooking method, but what makes a good chef great is that he can take something simple to a whole new level. Although this is a dish born in France, Chef Kishida made excellent use of the excellent quality of Japanese produce to give the dish a more Asian flavor.

For me, at least, the first thing that struck me about this goat cheese was the dense, silky texture and lingering dairy aroma, as opposed to the fermented goat's milk blue cheese that I ate in France that I just wanted to spit out in one bite. It's a different thing, but for me with shades of goat dairy, it really can be very friendly. The lily root gives the whole dish texture, the sea salt gives a savory taste experience while the olive oil provides a smooth texture and a drawing hint of acidity.

Seafood cuisine is one of my favorite parts of this meal. Quintessence is located in Tokyo, which is home to the world's largest seafood market, the Toyosu Market, and probably has the largest selection of seafood in the world. Meanwhile, Japanese people always treat food with reverence and consider it as a gift from God, and I am always impressed by their meticulous handling of the catch before the food is presented to the table.

So I raise my expectations for Chef Kishida's seafood and wonder if he will offer us seasonal hatsumode bonito? Or will he offer us sea bream, which represents the traditional aesthetic of Wagyu cuisine? Or would it be tuna, which represents today's Japanese cuisine? To my great surprise, Chef Kishida chose a giant grouper, commonly known in Cantonese cuisine as the amberjack!

Giant grouper doesn't seem to be a mainstream choice in France, where the French favor ingredients like sea bass or blue lobster. I believe that Chef Kishida must have his own insistence and innovative spirit in choosing ingredients, using the cooking methods taught by his master to deal with his own special ingredients found in Japan, so that the fish, which is difficult to steam in Cantonese cuisine, is crispy on the outside and tender on the inside, and has both a smooth texture and deep flavors. The rich oils of the giant grouper are paired with a slightly acidic eggplant-based sauce that does an excellent job of balancing the flavors, making this an excellent dish that showcases the caliber of the cuisine and the chef's philosophy.

For meats, Quintessence uses the very laborious continuous flame-break grilling method - a method of cooking where you put it in the oven for a minute to remove it, cool it for a minute and then put it back in, repeating the process of the above procedure over and over again. It's also a very signature dish at Quintessence and will offer different meats depending on the season, in this case I had lamb chops.

I mentioned above that the goat's milk BAVAROIS is made with goat's milk from Kyoto, Japan, but the lamb used in this lamb chop comes from baby lambs raised on an exclusive farm in France. I remember when I was a kid watching Harry Potter, there was an episode where a girl from France complained that the English can't cook lamb, it's always fully cooked, and it doesn't taste good at all. Since then, my image of the French has been “very good at cooking lamb”.

This is a dish that shows the global vision of a good chef, who doesn't limit himself to a single field, but tries and practices many times, and deserves our respect (his friend, Sous Chef Watanabe of Sushi Arai, told us during our meal that he is a workaholic, who is always thinking about how to improve his dishes); and secondly, in terms of the technique, this is really a dish that is a great example of the technique. Secondly, in terms of cooking technique, this is a really technically demanding and at the same time time time-consuming dish.

In an era where low-temperature and slow-cooking standardized quality control and a certain degree of simplification of the cooking process are popular in fine dining restaurants, the fact that Quintessence is able to insist on using such a complex process to make meat dishes is proof that the blood of craftsmanship is rushing through the veins of Kishida Wednesday; and finally, back to the taste, because the lamb from the exclusive farm was used, it was roasted with the skin on, and the outer skin was roasted and crispy. The outer skin is crispy, a bit close to the feeling of roasted whole lamb, but the inner lamb is about Medium Rare, which is probably the unique culinary effect that can be brought about by a very complex cooking technique.

The lamb was so tender that it could be cut with a knife, which is the French standard. And because it was grass-fed lamb, it didn't have any unappealing stench or other strange odors, even without the thick sauce. The tender, juicy lamb melts in your mouth as you chew it, and it's a delightful and satisfying meal with the roasted, crispy lamb skin providing a bit of char and crunch. This meat alone would be a reason for me to visit this restaurant again, but maybe next time I'll come back in a different season, like in winter, to try the Hokkaido Ezo venison, or in spring, to try the Matsusaka Tonkatsu pork that Chef Kishida has made famous.

The other dishes, not without excellence, each one actually has its own character and shows Chef Kishida's philosophy in one way or another, but space just doesn't allow me to write about them all. Together, these outstanding dishes build a French menu that is clear, conceptually complete, comfortably paced, and well done. Combined with the expertise of the service team, which is impeccable from the presentation of the food to the service of the wine, the dining experience is worthy of the word “elegant”.

I've heard from a number of diners that Quintessence's weakness is that the menu is slightly slow to change, making it seem a bit uninspired in a Tokyo where excellent restaurants abound and newborn restaurants are springing up. But what I ate was that Chef Kishida has his own persistence, and he's constantly exploring and improving, but innovation isn't the same as trying to create something completely new; it's more about constantly refining his craft.

From the very beginning, Chef Kishida was not one to be recognized by fancy dishes, expensive ingredient piling and selling so-called innovations, and to this day, he still isn't. A lot of people may not understand him, but I think he's just been feeling his way along what he believes to be the right path, and he's gotten farther than anyone else.

After all, at around 30,000 yen per person, it's arguably the cheapest three-star Michelin restaurant in all of Tokyo. Though you may not be able to eat any particularly expensive ingredients, the heart of the cook maximized both my heart and stomach, and that's what I appreciated the most.

When I finally left the restaurant, I looked at Kishida Chozo, who stood at the entrance of the restaurant and bowed with a smile on his face as he watched us leave, still wearing a modest and easy-going smile. A phrase flashed through my mind then, “A true master always has the heart of an apprentice.”

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