Masahiro Ishihara

Apprenticeship and French fine-dining training set the base of Masahiro Ishihara’s kitchen work. Under Michelin-starred Chef Katsuhiro Nakamura, and later in Michelin three-star restaurants in France, he built the technical discipline that still reads in his cooking: controlled timing, repetition, and attention to detail. The Hokkaido Toyako Summit in Hokkaido, Japan added a different lesson, where service had to hold together at scale.

Across the JR East Group, responsibility has widened rather than changed the terms of the work. Masahiro Ishihara is Executive Chef of NIPPON HOTEL, Executive Chef of The Tokyo Station Hotel, and Executive Chef of Hotel Metropolitan Premier Taipei. The span of those roles shows the level of trust placed in his kitchen judgment and the steadiness expected of the craft.

At The Tokyo Station Hotel, the cooking under Masahiro Ishihara is built on a French base with a Japanese sense of place. The point is not fusion for its own sake, but a cuisine that reads through scent, land, and context. As he puts it, “the cuisine is French, but it incorporates an awareness of the scents and land of Japan.” That same logic shapes the way the kitchen handles ingredients from both countries. Japan and France are used together to make dishes meant to exist in that specific setting, not anywhere else.

“We use the ingredients of Japan and France together to prepare dishes that can only be tasted here.” The first pull toward the profession was visual, not romanticized. Before the kitchen became a career, the image of cooks had its own pull, distinct from other fields he might have followed. That recognition settled the direction of his work early on: “I got interested in the look of cooks, rather than cycle racers, and I wanted to become a chef.”

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