Ma Poule

Vin jaune at the pass

The sauce waits for its final gloss before service. Tetsuya Ichioka is the owner-chef at Ma Poule in Tokyo, and he built the room around the Jura, the region of eastern France along the Swiss border where he spent close to nine years cooking. He opened the restaurant on 11 January 2017 near Todaimae Station and the University of Tokyo, after a career he describes as full of bumps and detours, and he named it the way Chef Jean-Paul Jeunet addressed his wife.

Jeunet is also the source of the dish the kitchen is built on: chicken with morel mushrooms in vin jaune sauce, adapted with Japanese ingredients. Ichioka calls his cooking simple and without frills, and the Jura is the fixed point rather than a theme. The restaurant holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand, which fits a narrow promise kept: a Tokyo table given over to vin jaune, morels, Savagnin, Comté, flans, terrines, game, and the kind of sauces that do not forgive loose timing.

Chicken, morels, and yellow wine

The centre of gravity is that chicken and morel dish, a Jura preparation depending on the wine’s oxidative pull and the savour of the mushrooms. Around it the program moves through escargot and mushroom flan, Shinano Yukimasu terrine, and chicken liver flan with crayfish sauce. These are not plates built for speed. A flan has to set cleanly; a terrine has to slice with its structure intact; a sauce has to carry fat, acidity, spice and the nutty register of yellow wine without becoming heavy.

The menu runs as a short course format rather than à la carte, with winter vegetables, herbs and local fish moving through it and optional additions of Jura cheese or a better cut of meat. The beverage work follows the same commitment: Jura wines lead the table, chosen by the proprietress, with vin jaune and Savagnin given the attention that makes sense beside morels, chicken, game and Comté. In a ten-seat restaurant a wine program can feel either token or exacting. Here it is part of the method, course by course, glass by glass.

A cottage room in Hongo

The room keeps close to the work. Yellow runs across the facade and through the interior, an echo of vin jaune rather than a branding exercise, and the French countryside references stay domestic: wallpaper, tablecloths, small decorative objects chosen by Mrs Ichioka, intimate light. The counter and tables bring the guest near enough to read the pacing of the pass, but the mood stays quiet. Service is formal in the old sense, attentive to sequence and proportion, not stiff.

Ten seats change the temperature of the craft. A dish does not disappear into volume; it lands almost bench-side, with the sauce, the bread, the wine and the next course all visible as parts of one discipline. What lasts is the persistence of the Jura in Tokyo: chicken, morels and vin jaune in the Hongo room.