Some of Japan's best rooms are the ones you cannot simply call. Takamura, thirteen seats near Akita's old Kawabata quarter, opens only to members and to those a member brings — a house built to stay quiet, and largely succeeding.
What you eat
An omakase of roughly eleven courses, Edo-refined but unmistakably northern, leaning on Akita's peak-season produce — including hinai-jidori, the prized local chicken, in preparations such as a silken liver pâté. The cooking is precise and unshowy, the seasons doing most of the talking.
The chef
Hiroki Takamura opened the house in 1999, having been head chef at Tokyo's celebrated Taiko-hachi; in 2016 Japan's Ministry of Agriculture named him a Cooking Master. A Tabelog Gold restaurant across several years and a fixture on the country's Top 100 Japanese-cuisine lists, Takamura is renowned well beyond a prefecture most travelers never route through.
Getting in
There is no walking in. Access runs through membership or an introduction, and every reservation is placed by phone in Japanese — the exact door our Tokyo desk is built to open.
