Reflections on a first and second visit to Kataori

Running late from Tokyo to Kanazawa

Our cheap flight from Beijing landed two hours late. The only connecting bullet train from Tokyo to our destination would get us in at 17:14 — our reservation was for 17:00. I was petrified. In Japan, being late is impolite — something I’d been told again and again — you just don’t do it. Especially not for what is, for me, perhaps the most captivating restaurant there is. I sent a message to Meg, bracing for the worst. Thankfully, she was understanding, reminding me that we might miss a few courses but to get there as quickly as possible.

In late 2024, Meg had been dining at Ernst for the last time. At the end of the meal, we were talking about Japanese ingredients, and it came up that Inga (my girlfriend) and I hadn’t been to Japan outside of January in over a decade. With Ernst closing that November, Meg suggested we visit during hotaru ika (firefly squid) season, typically the first few weeks of April. The one restaurant where we could enjoy the simplest yet highest-quality preparation was, of course, Kataori — a notoriously difficult-to-book kaiseki restaurant in Kanazawa, run by a husband-and-wife team. Eight seats, one seating per day. Chef Kataori-san collects the water and produce each morning from where he grew up in Toyama.

Toyama Bay, just next door, is the most famous place for catching hotaru ika in Japan — one of the few places where you can have them served tategi style: poached live, in their purest form. This would be our second visit to Kataori.