Yoshihiro Narisawa

Les Créations de Narisawa

107-0061 2-6-15
Minami Aoyama, Minato-ku
Tokyo
Giappone
+81.(0)3.57850799
lcdn@narisawa-yoshihiro.com

Today, thanks to Tv and Internet everybody is a genius or a world champion only because he’s useful to certain mechanisms of global communication. And, if you’re a genius for real, perhaps you’d better hide. How to replace a word who lost its original meaning? Just take a look at Yoshihiro Narisawa: he belongs to that small circle of chefs who, assuming he knows how to cook very well and with magical hands, added something of his own, a philosophy, a way of doing things raising him above average and putting him in a position of absolute originality and magnificence.

Narisawa was born in 1969. His curriculum has so much in common with hundreds of Japanese chefs: lots of Michelin-star places in France from 1988 (he was 18) but also a year in Italy, in 1992, with chef Ezio Santin at Antica Osteria del Ponte in Cassinetta Lugagnano, near Milan: «I remember him well, I always notice the best ones and never forget them», says today Santin. In 1996, he felt ready. Back in Japan, he opened La Napoule in Odawara, a seaside town south of Tokyo. Seven years later he moved to the capital's district of Aoyama and changed the name into the one we know today: Les Créations de Narisawa. ‘Creations’ is because Yoshihiro wanted to state as clear as possible that his cuisine is neither strictly Japanese, layered in ages by ironclad codes, nor even Westerner. It’s just his style, a synthesis between nature, timing and souls from the Land of the Rising Sun and everything he learned in his 8-years European training: haute cuisine, haute Eurasian cuisine. Narisawa understands Nature through five themes: Soil, Water, Fire, Charcoal and Forest. This understanding has led him to create dishes which involve environmental concerns.

The plate is a frame of his photographic art depicted with such ingredients: «Men should not only be eating a meal, they should absorb life itself. In my country it is customary to feel the passage of time from the changing colors of flowers and grasses, the chirping of birds, the blowing of the wind, moon phases and drifting and contemplating the joy of the four seasons. We can capture the birth, the heyday and the legacies of nature by being immersed in it. Every moment has its own beauty, and this beauty is bound to a sense of melancholy. Japanese believe that in all things there’s a god, and we should protect the spirit of the elements that give us the ingredients. This natural landscape, who was killed by the man himself, lives again in every pot». Hence the magnificence of Yoshihiro Narisawa.

Has participated in

Identità Milano


by

Paolo Marchi

born in Milan in March 1955, at Il Giornale for 31 years dividing himself between sports and food, since 2004 he's the creator and curator of Identità Golose.
blog www.paolomarchi.it
instagram instagram.com/oloapmarchi