Talk session report: Four years of connections among regional chefs

The Destination Restaurants 2024 award ceremony, hosted by The Japan Times, was held on May 28 at Hills House Sky Room Cafe & Bar in Tokyo’s Azabudai Hills. The criteria for selection are that the restaurants must lie outside major cities and help spark local revitalization. The event brought together the chefs of all 10 establishments selected this year, including Elezo Esprit in Hokkaido, the Destination Restaurant of the Year 2024. The ceremony was followed by a discussion among the three award judges, Yoshiki Tsuji, Naoyuki Honda and Takefumi Hamada, on the topic “Looking back at the four years of Destination Restaurants — connections among chefs and regions.”

In its first year, 2021, the number of potential candidates was quite small, but there has been an accelerating trend of chefs awakening to local areas’ potential and opening restaurants there. “Looking ahead to next year, the number of candidate restaurants has already surpassed 100,” said Tsuji, the facilitator of the discussion. This is a welcome trend that could also help shift the orientation of inbound tourism from big cities toward regional areas. In fact, award-winning chefs reported that as their restaurants have become better-known, the number of overseas travelers visiting them has increased. It was mentioned frequently that customers from overseas now account for about 30% of their clientele. Honda said, “It’s great that they can come into contact with each region’s history and way of life through meals at regional restaurants.” Travelers to Japan also hope to experience this type of encounter.

So, how do you create a restaurant that shines in a regional area? “Needless to say, you use ingredients from the area,” said Hamada. “At more and more restaurants currently gaining attention in regional areas, chefs are personally involved in the production of ingredients as creators, and in many cases they encourage producers to make new ingredients.” In this way, chefs have made use of their proximity to producers and pointed up the need for a consciousness of “creating” that starts with raw materials. Among this year’s award-winning restaurants, notable examples of those with an especially strong commitment to ingredients include Elezo Esprit, which serves dishes featuring meat that it produces from wild game and game fowl and ducks raised on the premises, and the restaurant at Enowa Yufuin in Oita Prefecture, which grows nearly all of its vegetables and herbs in its own fields.

In addition to the chefs honored at the award ceremony, attendees included chefs who have distributed meals to victims of the Noto Peninsula earthquake of Jan. 1 despite being impacted by the disaster themselves. Six months have passed, but the recovery of the Noto region has not progressed as hoped, and for most of the area’s restaurateurs the path to reopening is unclear. As a representative of the Noto area’s chefs, Toshiya Ikehata, the owner-chef of L’Atelier de Noto in Wajima, Ishikawa Prefecture — a Destination Restaurant of 2022 — expressed his thoughts as follows: “I was thanked by many people in the area, and felt very glad that I had become a chef. More emotional support programs will be needed in the area going forward, but I’m sure there are things we can do to help through cuisine.” Toru Kawashima, the owner-chef of Ipponsugi Kawashima in the city of Nanao in the Noto region, one of this year’s Destination Restaurants, said with tears in his eyes: “With a disaster of one minute, everything was gone — but the work we’ve done up to the present was not lost. There are many frustrations, but we have precious friends and colleagues, including fellow chefs.” His comment was met with many shouts of support from those in the venue. The Japan Times, for its part, donated a portion of the proceeds from its recently published book consisting of three years of Destination Restaurants articles and this year’s Destination Restaurants list. Ikehata, the chefs’ representative, accepted this donation at the event.

今年で４回目となるジャパンタイムズ主催「Desti nation Restaurants 2024」の授賞式が5月28日に行われた。選出基準は東京23区と政令都市を除く場所にあり、食を通じて街おこしの起点となる店。授賞式後は辻芳樹が司会進行を務める、アワードの審査員３氏と受賞シェフたちによる意見交換がなされた。

今回は令和6年能登半島地震で自ら被災しながら、地元の復興のために力を尽くす石川県のシェフたちも来場し、涙ながらに思いを述べると会場からは多くの声援が上がった。ジャパンタイムズからはこれまでの「Destination Restaurants」の記事をまとめ、出版した書籍の売り上げの一部を能登に寄付した。

すでに能登復興支援のため、コラボレーション・イベントを行った受賞シェフたちもいるなど、「Destination Restaurants」から、地方のシェフの繋がりが少しずつ形にもなっている。被災地を筆頭に、地方創生の課題は山積しているが、「食」を通じて解決できることはたくさんあるはずだ。

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