Using wild sansai (mountain vegetables) foraged at dawn and heirloom greens from alpine farms, chef Masahiro Tanabe serves his Nature French risotto with a whopping 54 varieties of greens from Nagano’s slopes.
This dish does not just celebrate terroir — it is terroir.
At Hikariya Nishi, a modern French restaurant in Nagano, the executive chef of Tobira Group, which runs it, makes a powerful statement with the first course of his Wellness Gastronomy menu.
Vegetables, harvested just hours before and timed to peak at service, erupted from a hand-thrown ceramic vessel, its rough texture and earthy hue mirrored the very soil they came from, creating a profound connection from earth to plate in the Relais & Châteaux gem in the castle town of Matsumoto, the second-largest city in the prefecture.
Vegetables are the soul of Shinshu cuisine, which takes after the former name of Nagano, recently popularised as a skiing destination.
“Shinshu’s cuisine is defined by the flavour of water — crystal-clear streams and alpine spring water — infuse vegetables with unparalleled freshness and vibrancy,” says Tanabe, who has worked in Lyon.
“These vegetables are truly unique to Nagano; their fragrance is vivid, and when you bite into them, it feels as though pure water is springing forth.”
A basket of seasonal vegetables, with earthy aroma, robust character, and deeply nourishing flavour. (Photo: Hikariya Nishi)
Nagano boasts Japan’s richest diversity of traditional vegetable varieties, a testament to centuries of alpine farming traditions. Diurnal temperature swings of 15 deg C or more stress plants out but also concentrate sugars, amplifying flavours and making vegetables especially tasty.
In the last 20 years, Tanabe has been championing Japan’s most exquisite ingredients, nurtured by Nagaon’s crisp mountain air and pristine waters, into thoughtful plates.
His philosophy, honed through macrobiotic studies and collaborations with artisan producers, proposes that any manipulation of ingredients should be done solely to unlock their full potential and to express their natural essence.
Focus on local
Hikariya Nishi is set in a prestigious merchant house with a history of over 130 years. (Photo: Hikariya Nishi)
For that, Tanabe makes monthly pilgrimages to Nagano’s backcountry, checking out everything from herbs to rare mushrooms and heritage grains across 150 boutique farms within his strict 200km sourcing radius.
His relentless pursuits shape every menu across the Tobira Group’s culinary empire, with 90 per cent of ingredients coming from Nagano’s borders. The group’s restaurants include Shinshu Dining Tobira, a Japanese restaurant celebrating regional comfort food, and Sai (vegetable in Japanese), a French-inspired wellness restaurant, at Myojinkan ryokan.
Two other concepts, Hikariya Nishi and Higashi, are in a nationally protected 130-year-old merchant house in Matsumoto.
One of the six organic gardens that supply ingredients to Hikariya Nishi. (Photo: Hikariya Nishi)
Rain slicked on the leaves at Finger Lime Japan, the country’s first finger lime farm, as we tasted the electric zing of Collette and Emma varieties. The next morning, we admired everything from red cabbage to udo and fuki in Azumino Plateau farm, run by 82-year-old Mitsuyo Soneyama, who has been collaborating with Tanabe fortwo decades.
Besides local producers who grow chemical-free or harvest wild, Tanabe sources from the group’s six organic farms, yielding 10 to 15 organic crops each season (spring warabi ferns to autumn shiitake), a chestnut orchard and a strawberry greenhouse.
At one of the group’s organic farms, we picked seasonal produce such as zucchini blossoms, snap peas, kabu, onions, and mulberries. “Vegetables that grow well together tend to be a fitting pairing on the plate,” Tanabe notes, citing lessons learned through years of farm visits.
But what he really wants is becoming increasingly rare by the day.
“With widespread commercial farming, few forage for wild vegetables these days,” he observes. “But treasures like shiode and amadokoro already exist in nature. Why overburden farmers when the mountains provide?”
Tasting the forest and streams
A kingdom of fungi, Nagano’s rain-soaked slopes and ancient forests yield the country’s richest harvest of wild and cultivated mushrooms. Earthy shiitake, velvety nameko and matsutake, the elusive jewel of the forest, thrive beneath Nagano’s misty pines.
Shiitake terrine. (Photo: Hikariya Nishi)
In the Gault & Millau-recognised Hikariya Nishi, Tanabe captures the majesty of this terroir in a signature shiitake terrine. The gelatin-free sculpture celebrates the single ingredient through artful technique: sliced, diced, and layered to reveal its many dimensions, and paired with the clarity of iwana (Japanese char) consommé.
Cut off from the ocean by its soaring peaks, Nagano’s alpine waters have long nourished native trout and char. For centuries, these shimmering catches defined Shinshu’s seafood traditions, their delicate flavours shaped by snowmelt and mountain springs.
Now, through ingenious aquaculture, farmers have created new breeds of seafood from the purity of its mountainous surroundings.
Masashi Kurihara, manager and sommelier of Hikariya Nishi. (Photo: Hikariya Nishi)
In southern Nagano, an ayu farm honouring the prefecture’s adaptive spirit raises the sweetfish for Michelin-starred restaurants across Japan. “10cm — that’s the size all chefs ask for,” explains Masashi Kurihara, manager and sommelier of Hikariya Nishi. “That’s the size where even the organs aren’t bitter (when cooked).”
Yet more exquisite is the chi ayu he serves. These five-cm baby ayu supplied to Tanabe are a rare delicacy that is best enjoyed Segoshi-style — a meticulous preparation, where the liver is removed before it is finely chopped to unveil a cucumber-like freshness.
After spending two days with the chef, we get the idea that great cooking is less about transforming ingredients through elaborate techniques and more about revealing their innate essence and purity.
His Nature French philosophy responds to nature’s rhythms in real-time — serving ingredients at their fleeting peak through restrained, chemical-free culinary practices.
Onion, served mid-course to create a quiet moment of pause. The contrast of light and shadow in the plating reflects the changing seasons and passage of time in Shinshu. (Photo: Hikariya Nishi)
While most chefs plan menus weeks ahead, Tanabe’s onion course was conceived during the morning he received a batch of organic onions that arrived sweet.
By sunset, they’d become edible haiku on the plate: he gently cooked each organic bulb before planting them in shavings of Nagano’s rare kokuyou (obsidian truffle) between its caramelised layers.
Perfecting Shinshu produce
Photo: Hikariya Nishi
Born in Yaita, Tochigi, Tanabe’s culinary journey began under Kazuki Otowa (a protégé of Alain Chapel) at Utsunomiya’s revered Otowa Restaurant.
At 19, he ventured to Lyon’s two-starred temples — Guy Lassausaie and Villa Florentine — to learn gastronomy’s language, leading kitchens, partnering with farmers to harvest ingredients at their zenith.
Over the years, Tanabe has been working with producers to improve cultivation methods and varieties, creating hyperlocal, bespoke produce that can only be enjoyed in this region.
The Shinshu Salmon (2004), a stunning model of landlocked aquaculture, is a hybrid of rainbow and brown trout that rivals ocean-farmed counterparts with its silken, butter-like flesh. But Tanabe pushes further, ordering his exclusive batches to be olive oil-fed, achieving unprecedented richness while eliminating residual odours.
In the last two decades, he has dedicated himself to perfecting the Shinshu French Duck, raised on regional feed for exceptional marbling. His secret weapon is the canard étouffé — a rare French technique, which involves retaining blood in the duck to intensify its flavour dramatically.
Nagano’s wild bounty — peasant, pigeon, deer, bear, and boar — is also featured in his larder, but the star is the Shinshu beef. It boasts sweetness and a distinctive aroma due to a curated diet of premium local ingredients, including the region’s famed apples.
The exquisitely marbled Shinshu beef has a distinctive aroma, partly due to its inclusion of apples in the cattle’s feed. (Photo: Hikariya Nishi)
At Shinshu Dining Tobira, head chef Tetsuya Uchiyama unveils the science behind Nagano’s apple-fed beef: an elevated amount of oleic acid — nature’s umami booster — creates unparalleled marbling and depth.
The culinary revelation continues at Hikariya Nishi, but this time with the prized kainomi, a rare shellfish-like cut near the ribs, celebrated for its exquisite balance of tender, lean meat and rich marbling, rivalling the tenderness of fillet.
“We lightly grill the beef over charcoal to infuse it with a subtle smoky aroma, and pair it with a sauce made from Yubeshi, a traditional preserved food from Tenryu Village in Nagano,” explains Tanabe.
The rarely seen condiment is made by adding wheat, flour, miso, walnut, and sesame seeds to steamed yuzu that is harvested in December and matured for three to four months.
“Few producers remain,” says Tanabe, who stockpiles this endangered condiment, transforming it into sauces that sustain both dishes and traditions.
Fermentation nation
Nagano’s frigid winters and rugged terrain once made food scarcity a relentless challenge, but necessity bred ingenuity, birthing ingenious preservation techniques.
Wooden barrels convert autumn’s daikon, sansai, and ume into umami bombs through winter, earning Nagano its hakkо̄ о̄koku (fermentation nation) moniker.
Arctic winds lock in nutrients for leaner months as radishes and fish are dried. With nature’s original freeze-drying, even mochi becomes crunchy.
To this day, the group’s organic farms still practise snow-cellaring (yukishita yasai), burying vegetables under three meters of snow in a 0 deg C, 90 per cent humidity snow vault that sweetens, tenderises, and transforms vegetables, making them more flavourful.
What were once subsistence strategies now define Nagano’s gastronomic soul. “For example, sunki-zuke (turnip pickles), shimi-dofu (freeze-dried tofu), and miso are humble ingredients elevated into enduring delicacies; these are all part of a fermentation culture that embodies the idea of nurturing flavour over time,” notes Tanabe.
Tanabe’s Artisan shows off the rich symphony of natural textures and flavours — varying degrees of sweetness, acidity, saltiness, bitterness, even umami. (Photo: Hikariya Nishi)
“While the presentation of my dishes may look French, I aim to capture the essence of Shinshu — its time, its atmosphere — in each dish,” says Tanabe.
In a carp dish, his delicate pie crust cradles the koi, eschewing heavy crème fraîche or obvious Japanese seasoning, coaxing French form and Shinshu soul into perfect harmony, creating a cuisine that’s wholly Tanabe.
“This is what I learnt in France; we learned not to copy but ultimately to create our own,” he notes.
When pressed to define his culinary signature, he offers a poetic vision: “The scent of soil, scent of wind and sound of river — it is difficult to explain in words, but that is what diners taste and feel when they come to us, the same as I felt in the countryside walking through farmers’ fields.”
Dining and Cooking