Toshiya Kadowaki

Toshiya Kadowaki is the chef-owner and founder of Azabu Kadowaki, where he works as head chef and owner within a disciplined Japanese cuisine framework that also allows room for pleasure, surprise, and personal instinct. His path began in management department staff at Koshi in Roppongi, close to the machinery of service, before he entered the kitchen there as a chef trainee. That change replaced administration with prep, timing, repetition, and the basic discipline of kitchen work. Japanese cooking was learned through close observation and repeated correction, and that training deepened when he became a chef trainee under Fukuichiro Motegi at Tsukiji Uemura. He continued as a chef at the Nishinippori store in Nishinippori and then as a trainee and student at Kamogawa and Kaiyantei. Before opening his own restaurant, he also served as a chef at listed companies, adding operational experience to his cooking background. Kadowaki’s work at Azabu Kadowaki stays within Japanese forms while widening the ingredient vocabulary. He uses Western ingredients, including truffles and foie gras, in Japanese-restaurant dishes, treating them not as decoration but as a way to add perfume, richness, and pleasure inside a Japanese structure. The result can remain quiet and polished, then move into opulence without leaving its foundation of restraint. Knife skill, counter work, attention to season, and calibrated generosity remain central to his approach. His best-known expression of this balance is truffle rice. In the dish known as Truffles and Rice, black summer truffles from Italy are hand-shaved by Kadowaki, and unconventional mushrooms are also used. Warm rice sits at the center, with truffle aroma finishing the dish through gesture at the table. The dish has become the restaurant’s clearest statement of Japanese structure shaped by selected Western ingredients and aimed directly at guest pleasure. French-inspired rice with truffles is also among the most recognizable parts of his work, reinforcing the same idea of rice as the anchor and truffles as the source of fragrance and richness. Hospitality is part of Kadowaki’s technique. He has said that his aim is to make people happy, and he believes that the customer is the teacher. That view places the dining room inside the cooking process, with guest response treated as information that helps shape the meal. At Azabu Kadowaki, attention matters as much as recipe, and service is part of the craft. Recognition for the restaurant includes Three MICHELIN stars, Two MICHELIN stars for more than 10 years, and selection for Tabelog Japanese cuisine TOKYO "Tabelog 100". These acknowledgments reflect a restaurant built on Japanese cuisine while making room for truffles, foie gras, and rice to carry the same sense of service.