L'Embellir Naoto Kishimoto is the restaurant I'm talking about and it could very easily be overlooked since it shared the same entrance with other tenants in a place called Nakamurarō (中村楼).
The place, just on the edge of Maruyama Park (圓山公園) right outside the entrance of Yasaka Shrine, has a host of different restaurants including a Japanese tea salon and kappo-style restaurant.
L'Embellir Naoto Kishimoto Nakamurarō, the younger sister of the restaurant under the same name in Aoyama Tokyo, opened its door here back in 2014. Both branches have been a 1-star Michelin restaurant since 2015 and the current head chef in Kyoto is Hideaki Mori, a pretty young chef who has trained in L'Asseiette Champenoise and Michel Bras Toya.
This is a very elegant dining room with a lovely view to the courtyard of the shrine. The venue is not particularly big but can comfortably seat around 30-40 diners at the same time.
Our lunch started off with a small egg nog. Inside the eggshell was savory egg soup with shredded bread and clams.
That was pretty good.
Next, we were shown a dish with all kinds of seasonal vegetables including variations of turnip and radish (I can never tell between turnip and radish) prepared and baked with sea salt.
Our servers took it away momentarily to plate them properly with our first dish - pan seared sweetbread.
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of sweetbread but I will make an exception for this perfectly seared sweetbread which was both rich and flavorful. A nice job by the vegetables to offset the richness of the sweetbread there.
My fish course was pan fried sawara fish, or Japanese Spanish mackerel. This was a beautiful dish with a symphony of flavors coming from a sauce made with sea urchin and egg yolk, a crab foam, champagne mushrooms, lily bulbs and edible flowers. Very nice.
The final course before dessert was Kyoto beef served on a very intense vegetable broth. I thought the chef did an incredible job picking two parts of the beef, breast and leg, for this dish to showcase two very different textures and flavors. It was also an impressive display of very precise cooking and matching the beef with mustard cream, vegetable jelly, carrots, bean sprout purée and celery bacon foam was an excellent choice to bring out the best of the Kyoto beef.
We wanted the journey to keep on going but unfortunately, we were down to our last dish, which was a deconstructed tiramisu with masala wine, ladyfinger biscuit, mascarpone cheese cream and coffee ice-cream. This looked very simple but again, they used the different textures and flavors to dazzle our taste buds.
Following that wonderful culinary journey, time to sit back and enjoy a cup of warm tea.
We were then served a small glass of iced sweet potato vinegar.....
.....along with our petite fours (walnut cake, matcha mochi etc.).
Kyoto doesn't have the wealth of high-profile fine-dining restaurants like Tokyo does but if you're willing to dig a little deeper, there are in fact some really outstanding places like L'Embellir Naoto Kishimoto waiting for your discovery.
Food Rating: 7/10
Price: ￥￥￥
Address: Gion Yasaka Shrine Torii, Higashiyama-ku, Kyoto 605-0074, Kyoto, Japan
Closest Metro Station: Gion-Shijo
Tel: +81 75-551-7386
Website: www.lembellir.com/jp/kyoto/
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