Kentaro Nakayama

The Path

Apprenticeship in the 1980s and the move to Italy in 1992 as a first-generation ICIF student shaped the basis of Kentaro Nakayama’s work. The training gave him an education in Italian technique, extended by French cuisine, and later brought back into a Japanese setting. The arc is practical rather than theatrical: years of discipline, study abroad, and a return to Tokyo with a method built from accumulated experience.

The Work Today

At Romantico in Tokyo, the kitchen is organized around a restrained approach to Italian cooking in a residential setting. As Executive Chef, Nakayama works within a rhythm that values precision over display, with Italian and French cuisine remaining central to the restaurant’s identity. The result is composed rather than decorative, with no interest in excess for its own sake. That restraint is part of the work’s definition. In 2006, Nakayama was described as an honest chef, always keeping in mind what Japanese cuisine should be like. Read plainly, that means the cooking is shaped by Italian study in Italy, French cuisine within his specialty, and an ongoing attention to how those influences are received on a Japanese plate, for Japanese diners, in Japan. Adaptation here is not treated as dilution; it is treated as craft responsibility.

Signature

Kentaro's signature dishes include anago fritter, squid ink risotto, and confit ayu fish. Taken together, they point to a cook attentive to texture, depth, and the balance between refinement and comfort. The dishes sit within the same measured framework as the kitchen itself: familiar forms handled with care and anchored in place.

In Their Words The statement reflects the realities of opening and sustaining a restaurant: capital, overhead, and the patience required to make a room and a menu hold.

Acclaim

Executive Chef is the clearest public marker attached to Nakayama, and in this profile it functions less as decoration than as proof of the role he holds in the kitchen. It names the responsibility behind the work rather than adding ceremony to it. The 1992 status of first-generation ICIF student gives the career a specific international reference point. It places Nakayama within a period when Japanese cooks were studying directly in Italy, and when that kind of exchange still signaled a deliberate step outward. The 2006 description of him as honest adds a second form of recognition, one tied closely to how his cooking is read: direct, disciplined, and attentive to Japanese context.