Den

Kaiseki is the formal multi-course meal of Japanese haute cuisine: seasonal, sequenced, restrained, and traditionally consumed in near silence. Den keeps the seasonality and the technique and discards the solemnity. The result is a tasting menu that makes people laugh, which is not a sentence that gets written about two-star restaurants very often.

The two dishes that made the restaurant’s name have become fixtures. The ‘Dentucky Fried Chicken’ arrives in a small takeaway box with the kitchen’s own parody branding on it, and inside is a chicken wing stuffed with sticky rice and vegetables and fried. The salad is a bowl of twenty-odd vegetables and leaves, each prepared differently, arranged with a carrot carved into a small figure. Both are jokes and both are technically serious, which is the whole point.

The rest of the menu moves with the season and with what the kitchen has found. Expect a clear soup that demonstrates the dashi, a raw course, something grilled over charcoal, a rice pot finished at the counter, and a dessert that is usually more inventive than Japanese fine dining normally allows.

What Den is genuinely famous for among people who work in restaurants is not a dish. It is the service. The team remembers guests, adapts courses to what a particular table seems to want, and has a documented habit of researching diners in advance and producing something personal – a plate referencing where you are from, a garnish referencing your job.

This is a deliberate reworking of omotenashi, the Japanese idea of anticipatory hospitality, into something warm rather than ceremonial. Nobody is rigid, nobody hovers, and the chefs talk to the counter while they work. If you have found high-end Japanese dining intimidating before, this is the antidote.

Practically, this means tell them things. Allergies, dislikes, an anniversary, a first visit to Japan – the restaurant does something with that information. Turning up silent and anonymous gets you an excellent meal and misses the reason people come back.

Reservations open a set period in advance and are taken through the restaurant’s own channels. They go quickly – minutes rather than hours – so the workable approach is to know the exact date and time the window opens for your travel dates, be at a screen for it, and have a second choice of date ready.

Two other routes exist and both have caveats. A concierge at a good hotel – the Okura or Hoshinoya are the obvious examples – can sometimes place guests, and that is a genuine service rather than a favour. Third-party booking agencies charge a fee to do what you could do yourself, and their success rate is not obviously better than yours.

Do not build a trip around this table until it is confirmed. If it does not come off, Tokyo has more starred restaurants than any city on earth and a great many of them take bookings without drama – and the Bib Gourmand counters on this site are, for most visitors, the better story anyway.