Fine dining and an eco-friendly mindset come together in perfect balance in the cooking of Mauro Colagreco. His three-Michelin-starred restaurant Mirazur, on the French Riviera, was ranked number one on 2019’s World's 50 Best Restaurants list, while this Argentine-born chef’s contributions to ‘circular’ gastronomy led Unesco to appoint him as a Goodwill Ambassador for Biodiversity. With Cycle, his first restaurant opening on Japanese soil, Colagreco’s vision has reached Tokyo.
A sense of being rooted in nature is apparent upon entering Cycle. Sizeable trees dot this warmly lit space in Otemachi, where the tables are made from wood buried by a volcanic eruption over 2,000 years ago. Outside, the woods of the Imperial Palace serve as ‘borrowed scenery’ in the tradition of a Japanese garden.
Colagreco’s circular approach to cuisine is similarly evident from the beginning. Multi-course menus (lunch from ¥16,500, dinner from ¥26,400) consist of dishes each offering a concise message regarding sustainable eating, and start with a welcome bouillon made with the removed, usually discarded, parts of the day’s vegetables.
Everything that follows is artfully presented, such as a four-dish appetiser selection in which each offering visualises a theme. Regeneration, for example, is represented by a ‘flower’ dish consisting of a mackerel and apple tart with pickled chrysanthemum flowers.
The main dish when we visited, entitled ‘Rose’, was Yezo deer wood-roasted with ingredients including rose-family apples and rose petals in order to manifest a scent of the titular flower. Dinner at Cycle is an indulgence that almost belies that work, such is the nature-based healing it delivers to the senses.
Text by Darren Gore