FlorilègeA single table running from the door to the kitchen

Why there is only one table

Azabudai Hills, Tokyo, Japan — French cooking with vegetables at the front.

Hiroyasu Kawate describes the restaurant with a single word, balance: guests eat well, and he still wants to be in the kitchen. On the menu it shows as meat, fish and dairy stepping back while vegetables come forward. The closer he tries to cook what he is thinking now, the further towards vegetables he moves.

Guests pass a reception desk and a stretch of corridor, turn a corner, and find a thirteen-metre table laid across the room. The whole meal is eaten at it, the kitchen standing at one end and a row of chairs running down each side.

Kawate was born in Tokyo in 1978, into a family of cooks. He worked at Le Bourguignon in Nishiazabu, Jardin des Sens in Montpellier and Quintessence in Shirokane-dai, and moved the restaurant from Jingumae to Azabudai in September 2023.

The table is the kitchen's edge

From the reception desk the room narrows into a corridor, and then opens. One table fills the whole space, a row of chairs down each side and the top in dark stone. The kitchen stands at one end of it, and through the pass the people working there stay in plain view of everyone seated, so nobody has to turn round to watch.

The official site calls the arrangement table d'hôte: one party sitting together around a long table, the way a family eats. Waiters move along the edge, so at service the person setting down a plate is standing just across from you. The site describes the feeling as being let into somebody's dining room in the middle of the city, and the length of the table does most of that work.

Why the menu moved towards vegetables

Kawate treats sustainability as a direction rather than a label, and the way he follows it is to let vegetables carry the menu while meat and fish fall back. What he picks are the ordinary vegetables of a kitchen, handled differently from the usual way, so that the flavour changes with the method as much as with the ingredient itself.

The main course is a choice of meat or vegetables, filled in guest by guest at booking. The official site is explicit that the vegetable option does not make the meal vegetarian: the menu as a whole still contains meat, fish and dairy, so it is not a vegetarian or a vegan menu in either sense of the word, and the site takes the trouble to say so.