Hiroshi Nakamichi went to France in 1974, at twenty-three, and spent three years learning the craft before returning north. He opened Moliere in 1984, and the house has since collected the highest possession in Japanese dining: three Michelin stars, in both the 2012 and the 2017 special Hokkaido editions. It stands in a freestanding house near Maruyama-koen, and it holds a stubborn old habit. Reservations are taken by telephone, never online.
What you eat
French cooking built on the produce of Hokkaido, an island that gives a kitchen more to work with than almost anywhere in Japan. The house speciality is a meunière of kasube — skate — a dish Nakamichi has made his signature over the decades. Around it, a chef's menu that moves with the northern seasons.
The chef and the house
Three years in France in the 1970s, then a lifetime turning that training onto Hokkaido's own fields and coast: that is the whole arc of Nakamichi's cooking. The restaurant sits quietly in a residential pocket near the park, a house rather than a room in a hotel, and the two Michelin editions that named it confirm what Sapporo has long known.
Worth the journey for
Travelers who want the top of Japanese French cooking, in the one region whose produce can carry it, and who don't mind that booking means a phone call rather than a click.