Masao Saisu

The Essentials by 1983, and the work here is defined less by flair than by repetition, precision, and the discipline to keep refining the details. As a former executive chef and owner-chef, he built a career around technique and a standard that appears to have been set by endurance as much as by appetite. In that frame, authority and humility are not opposites; they are part of the same kitchen practice, the combination that lets a chef direct a line while still learning from it. A formative reference point in that practice came at La Blanche, where Tashiro’s cooking overturned an existing set of assumptions. Masao Saisu has described that meal plainly: “When I went to eat at La Blanche, I was struck by the way Tashiro cooked, because it was completely different from what I had learned.” It shows how technique can remain recognizably French while still opening onto a different working language. Kitchen labor is part of the same ledger. Masao Saisu has summed up the pressure of the profession without softening it: “I worked like a dog. But I told myself I wouldn't die like a dog.” The sentence is blunt, but it reads as a craft ethic: accept the strain, refuse to let the strain be the only outcome. In that sense, the work is not romanticized. It is treated as the condition under which discipline is earned and ownership becomes possible. Taken together, those remarks describe a career in French cuisine built on observation, absorption, and persistence. Masao Saisu is retired; Côte d'Or in Mita, Tokyo, has closed. His path, from entering the field in 1986 to becoming former executive chef and owner-chef, is not framed as a single breakthrough. It is presented as a slow deepening, shaped by a meal that reset expectation and by labor that taught him how to keep going.

In Their Words “When I went to eat at La Blanche, I was struck by the way Tashiro cooked, because it was completely different from what I had learned.” “I worked like a dog. But I told myself I wouldn't die like a dog.”