On Monday, I took my wife to lunch at Onodera Makiyaki Ginza, a French wood-fired oven restaurant. It has been a long time since we went to a fancy restaurant – this place has a Michelin star from the 2025 Tokyo Guide. I made reservations as a Christmas gift a few months back. We used to go to fancy restaurants every once in a while, but just haven’t done that very much in Tokyo since our son was born 13 years ago.

The restaurant was on the 7th floor of a building with a few other Onodera restaurants in it, and was fairly small. They had seating for eight, but there were only four of us there for lunch today.

Caviar on a Seaweed Waffle

The amuse bouche was caviar on a seaweed waffle. It was paired with a nice Collet Brut Champagne.

Bluefin reef Squid, Tardivos, Burrata Cheese

The squid was served with a delicious bread that had a very nice accompanying butter the shop made. The bread was cooked in the wood stove as well.

The bread and butter was great – I absolutely had seconds of that. I ordered the wine pairing for us both, which was great, we had eight different wines which all went very well with the paired food.

Seasonal Salad

The salad used ingredients from Saitama, all organic, and was very good. They had some rare vegetables in there, and they explained all of them. Since I didn’t write anything down and I had eight different wines, I can’t recall what all of them were. The green thing in the front was an Italian vegetable, grown locally, that is pretty rare. Or at least, I’ve never seen one before.

The kale-like thing was dried out like a chip, and was very nice and crunchy. All of the vegetables were good, and I ate them mostly individually.

Sweet Shrimp, Malted Rice, Rape Blossom

The shrimp was one of my favorite dishes of the night. I could have eaten something much bigger – but given the length of the course I’m glad I didn’t. It was paired with a nice wine that offset the sweetness of the shrimp.

Shiitake Mushroom, Leek, Margao pepper

The Shiitake were huge – about twice the size of the ones that we usually cook with. Very good.

Spanish mackerel, Kumquat, Smoked Pickled Radish

Or the wine might have been this one:

I got behind on wine at some point, but this was the last wine before the red that came with the beef. All the wine was very good.

Kumamoto Wagyu beef Sirloin

The beef was great. I like the Japanese style of steak – we of course get steak when we visit Texas, but it is very different. In Texas, you get a really large slab of meat – and it is good too, but the appeal is on the size of the cut. At least that is how I feel compared to Japan, where you usually get much smaller portions. This went great with both the salt or the wasabi, thought I slightly preferred the salt.

Ramen from Akita with Kinka Pork

The finishing dish was ramen – and very good.

They added some Sansho spice to the Ramen a bit into it as we were eating, and that was great too. I drank up all the soup. Or perhaps I was just starting to get dehydrated.

Baked Marshmallow with seasonal fruit

The first dessert (you know I found a good place when they have two desserts) was baked marshmallow with seasonal fruit. Our fruit was strawberries.

Cheesecake

The final dessert was a nice fire-baked cheesecake. I won’t turn down a nice cheesecake no matter how full I am.

Roasted Green Tea

Finally, they finish the course with Hojicha (roasted tea). They showed up the fresh tea leaves earlier in the course, and cooked them throughout the meal. Apparently it is pretty tough to get that right, but things turned out delightfully. The smell was just amazing.

They brought the roasted tea leaves out and wafted the smoke over us. It smelled delightful.

The plates and cups were nice throughout the meal. I liked how we both got different tea cups.

It was a very nice lunch. Our anniversary is coming up again in May, so I think I’ll do something similar – take another day off of work and take Lisa to a nice lunch somewhere. She thought this place was very good, so we may return – the menu changes every month – or I might look for something new.