Cicada

Keeping the pass broad enough for the room

David Chiddo sets the work at Cicada in Tokyo where menu direction meets the movement of service. As Chef at the Minami-Aoyama restaurant, David Chiddo holds a station that is less about a single signature plate than about keeping a large, varied room in rhythm. His own description of the job reaches beyond the pass: producing and developing different concepts for customers with different tastes and budgets. That is a practical sentence, and it suits the place. Cicada asks its kitchen to feed the long table, the terrace table, the drink-and-share table, and the guest who wants a full pan-Mediterranean meal built from smaller plates. Chiddo is a native New Yorker, now working inside Tokyo’s demand for control, pacing, and detail. The restaurant opened in 2012 in its larger Minami-Aoyama quarters, where the dining room, terrace, pools, bakery, café, lounge seating, wine list, and sister-brewery beers make one operation with many tempos. The chef’s task is to keep those tempos from scattering. The hand is in the ordering of the offer, the seasoning of each plate, and the discipline that lets the room feel loose without the kitchen becoming loose.

A Mediterranean bench built by components

The menu works by assemblage: Spanish, Italian, Greek, Moroccan, and Levantine references, arranged for sharing rather than a fixed progression. Guests can build a meal from hams, salamis, cheeses, vegetable platters, and cooked plates, then let the wine program or beer program set the pace. The named dishes explain the method better than a thesis. Halloumi cheese comes from Hokkaido, while Ibérico ham comes from Spain. Chermoula-roasted eggplant brings herbs, spice, and oil into the vegetable section; harissa-marinated shrimp gives the pass heat and char; chicken tagine with preserved lemons and olives anchors the table with a slower North African register. The structure favors reach without grandstanding. A cheese plate can sit beside shrimp, cured ham beside eggplant, and the table can keep ordering by appetite rather than by course. The beverage side follows the same logic. The wine list carries more than twenty wines by the glass and more than 100 by the bottle, with a Mediterranean and Old World center of gravity. Craft beers come from the restaurant’s sister brewery, giving the back bar another house-linked rhythm.

Water beside the room

The room is not built like Tokyo’s compact counters. Cicada stretches outward, with water features, terrace seating, and poolside lounge chairs that turn the meal toward lingering. The atmosphere stays lively, and the international crowd gives the dining room a moving, multilingual texture, but the design keeps pulling the eye back to the surface of the pools and the space between tables. That matters for the craft. A kitchen working in small plates needs a room that can hold delay, return, and conversation; the pass sends out plates that may land in twos, threes, or waves. The counterpoint is smoke-free polish rather than ceremony. The restaurant lets the guest graze, gather, drink, and come back to the table for another plate of Hokkaido halloumi.