Forget Paris - Now Tokyo Is the Home of Haute Cuisine

TOKYO — Paris was forced to swallow its pride yesterday as Tokyo stole its crown as the city with the most Michelin-starred restaurants.

From local sushi houses to formal Japanese banquets, the city's top food spots scooped a total of 191 stars, almost double Paris's 97 and triple New York's 54.

Every restaurant listed in the new Tokyo Michelin Guide — the first published outside Europe and America — has at least one star.

"The more restaurants we visited, the more stars we needed to allocate," the global director of Michelin guides, Jean-Luc Naret, said.

Japan has long been a country where food and culinary-related traditions are taken very seriously. Certain restaurants are known to write poems about customers to accompany their meals while few Japanese would think twice about queuing for hours to eat seasonal delicacies.

From char-grilled Kobe crabs served in boiled sake sauce to dried salted mullet roe, a wealth of dishes goes far beyond the Western image of Japanese food as limited to conveyor-belt sushi.

With 160,000 restaurants across the city, Michelin's mission to uncover the best establishments involved five undercover inspectors — three European and two Japanese — visiting more than 1,500 eateries over 18 months.

Of the eight three-star restaurants, five serve Japanese cuisine and three French, while a further 27 received two stars and 117 one star in the guide, which is published in English and Japanese.

There is three-star Hamadaya, a 1912 former Geisha house with 11 private dining rooms, bamboo screen doors and a string of delicate seasonal dishes created in formal kaiseki style, the Japanese equivalent of haute cuisine.

In contrast, Kanda, another three-star holder, has a sign so discrete it is easy to miss the entrance. But its low-key setting belies its "premium seasonal ingredients," ranging from bream and bonito in the spring to tuna and mackerel in autumn.