In June 2026 the Japan Times' Destination Restaurants jury did something it had never done: it named its restaurant of the year unanimously. The winner was not in Kyoto or Tokyo. It was eight seats around one table in Kesennuma — Japan's shark capital — inside a hotel whose lobby wall still carries the red line of the 2011 tsunami's height.
Yoji Kuromori was the first Japanese head chef in the storied Fook Lam Moon lineage. The earthquake pulled him north; a decade of his Sendai restaurant made him famous; in 2025 he moved to the port itself, because — as he says — 99% of people think "shark fin" is one thing, and he has spent his life proving it is many.
What you eat
A progression through four shark species and nine distinct cuts of fin — breast, back, tail, the prized filament bands — each soaked and cooked to its own collagen, some in defiance of Cantonese convention. The upper course adds Sanriku dried abalone of the grade Edo-era Japan once shipped to Canton. This is the deepest shark-fin cooking in Japan, from a port where the shark is used whole — meat, skin, fin — by fleets that never practice finning, from species scientists class as low-risk. The restaurant explains this honestly, in English, because it knows exactly who is asking.
The Noren View
Come skeptical if you must; leave understanding why a jury of Japan's toughest critics voted as one. Pair it with the dawn fish market — carrying its 28th straight year as Japan's top bonito port — and the tsunami memorial school, and you get the rarest thing in food travel: a dinner that explains a town.
Who should go
Eaters who want the frontier — and travelers who believe the best reason to go somewhere is that no one they know has been.