PARIS • Chef Kei Kobayashi became the first Japanese chef to win the maximum three Michelin stars in France on Monday.
The flamboyant 42-year-old, who was born in Nagano, was the biggest winner on a night when Japanese cooks triumphed in the backyard of French haute cuisine.
Kobayashi opened his restaurant, Kei, in the centre of the French capital nine years ago. He wowed diners with dishes such as sea bass cooked on its scales, and smoked salmon with roquette mousse and a tomato vinaigrette with lemon emulsion.
Only some 130 restaurants worldwide hold the guide's highest distinction.
Kazuyuki Tanaka won two stars for Racine, his restaurant in the north-eastern city of Reims, as did Yasunari Okazaki for his sushi and crossover cuisine at L'Abysee au Pavillon Ledoyen in Paris.
Kobayashi - a striking figure with bleached-blond hair - said Japanese cooks have earned their place at the top table of French cuisine.
"There are lots of Japanese chefs now in France and you have accepted us and given us a place," he said as he picked up the highest distinction in French cooking.
"Thank you, France," he added.
Kobayashi admitted that his perfectionism can make him a difficult person to work with. "I am quite hard. I ask a lot of my team and then I ask a lot more," he joked.
A dozen top Japanese cooks in France have shaken up the Michelin guide's elite ranks in recent years, led by two-star chefs Takao Takano in Lyon and Masafumi Hamano at the Au 14 Fevrier near Macon in rural Burgundy.
Last year, Keigo Kimura at the Asperule in Dijon and Takafumi Kikuchi at La Sommeliere in Lyon won their first stars for helping to redefine and re-invent French cuisine.
VIRTUOSO OF FLAVOURS
Critics hailed the precision of Kobayashi's cooking and the way he made relatively simple dishes such as gnocchi, truffle, bellota ham and parmesan cheese extraordinary.
The chef said after his victory on Monday that he did not like his cooking to be "categorised" as either French or Japanese, "just the best".
The famous red guide described him as a "virtuoso of flavours" and his cooking as both "delicate and memorable".
"It's very simple. Every dish that Kei turns the rigour of his attention to is called on to become a signature one," it added.
But not all French gastronomes were convinced. Influential culinary website Atabula said Kobayashi's cooking lacked "coherence and emotion", adding that although his restaurant was "a good two-star table, it's a thin three-star one".
But Kobayashi is not easily shaken.
He said he did not need to hang pictures on the walls of his 30-seat restaurant - which he runs with his wife Chikako - even with its sparse grey interior. "My cuisine provides the necessary touches of colour."
NEW FRENCH OPENNESS
The son of a chef who worked in a traditional Japanese multi-course kaiseki restaurant, Kobayashi decided to dedicate himself to French cuisine after watching a television documentary about nouvelle cuisine pioneer Alain Chapel, himself a chef of a three-star Michelin restaurant.
Kobayashi moved to France in 1998 after training in French restaurants in Japan, working under legendary chef Gilles Goujon at the Auberge du Vieux Puits on the Swiss border and Alain Ducasse at the Plaza Athenee in Paris before going out on his own.
Michelin's rewarding of so many Japanese chefs shows how French gastronomy - once regarded as the best in the world - has opened up to foreign cooks as its dominance has waned.
Last year, Argentinian chef Mauro Colagreco became the first foreign chef working in France to get three Michelin stars for his restaurant Mirazur, overlooking the Mediterranean at Menton near the Italian border.
Two French chefs - Christopher Coutanceau from the western port city of La Rochelle and Glenn Viel, who cooks at the Oustau de Baumaniere hotel in Baux-de-Provence - joined Kobayashi this year in earning the maximum Michelin ranking for their restaurants.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE