Nagasaki was Japan's one window on the world for centuries, and its table shows it. Shippoku — a banquet where Japanese, Chinese and Dutch influences meet on great shared platters — is the city's own cuisine, and Kagetsu serves it inside history. The house stands on the grounds of the Hikitaya, a grand teahouse of the Maruyama pleasure quarter opened in 1642; in 1960 the site was designated a historic landmark of Nagasaki Prefecture. It is a reservation-only house, and the reservation is for more than a meal.
What you eat
Shippoku, taken the way it is meant to be: a circle of guests reaching into large platters, the Japanese, Chinese and Dutch strands of Nagasaki's past laid out together. Lunches run ¥8,000 to ¥13,000; a full shippoku course begins around ¥15,000. It is served in tatami rooms, including private ones, in keeping with the formality of the setting.
The rooms and their history
The building carries its story on its surfaces. In the Ryu-no-Ma — the Dragon Room — a sword scar in the post is said to have been left by Sakamoto Ryoma; the Tsuki-no-Ma, the Moon Room, looks over a garden Katsu Kaishu is said to have loved. The house keeps an archive, the Shukokan, holding calligraphy in Ryoma's own hand among its pieces. You dine, in effect, inside a museum of the Bakumatsu years.
Who should reserve
Travelers who want Nagasaki's shippoku where the city's whole history of foreign contact is written into the room, and who will book ahead, as the house requires.