Naoyuki Yanagihara

Born in Tokyo and trained in fermentation science and Traditional Japanese Cuisine, Naoyuki Yanagihara’s cooking begins with time, restraint, and controlled change. In Buenos Aires, that training shapes the contemporary menu at Bis Bistró with a Japanese frame that is based in precision rather than display. His work connects classroom discipline, kitchen execution, and dining-room service through technique and consistency.

Fermentation research formed the technical base of his career early on. At a soy sauce company, he worked in a field where flavor is developed through balance, patience, and close attention to change over time. Kitchen work on a Dutch tall ship brought a different discipline, requiring cooking under motion, limits, timing, and utility outside the control of a formal restaurant kitchen. That experience placed technique under changing conditions rather than protected ones.

His later role as a food and culture envoy for Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry moved culinary transmission into a cultural context. In that setting, cuisine functions as carried knowledge, with ingredients, method, and cultural reference moving across borders while retaining their structure. Today, his work as president and teacher of Japanese cooking at Yanagihara Cooking School of Traditional Japanese Cuisine, together with his role as Executive Chef of Bis Bistró, keeps preservation and application in parallel.

Teaching Japanese cooking requires technique to be explained as well as performed. At Yanagihara Cooking School of Traditional Japanese Cuisine, his work depends on naming the reason behind a gesture, a sequence, or a balance, so that traditional practice can be repeated by others rather than left as intuition. Restaurant work applies the same discipline under service pressure. At Bis Bistró, he brings Japanese culinary precision and a Japanese sensibility to a contemporary menu in Buenos Aires, where technique must meet sourcing, pacing, guest expectation, and the operational demands of a dining room.

His craft is defined by overlap: fermentation science, traditional Japanese culinary education, and contemporary restaurant work in Argentina. The authority in his work comes from those combined disciplines, with the researcher’s patience, the teacher’s clarity, the cook’s adaptability, and the envoy’s understanding that cuisine carries culture through method. Signature dishes such as Sumashi siru, a clear Japanese soup with grilled butterfish, and Deep-fried mackerel reflect a commitment to clarity and control.

In these preparations, broth functions as a structural element, while the mackerel depends on managing richness and texture without excess. Both sit within a Japanese discipline where apparent simplicity requires exact handling. Michelin Bib Gourmand recognition for Bis Bistró in 2024 places his Buenos Aires work within a category built around value, consistency, and craft. That recognition sits alongside his teaching and traditional-cuisine roles rather than replacing them.