Five Generations, One Fish, and a 97-Year-Old Chef Still Behind It
Kanejiro Kanemoto has been grilling eel long enough to have outlasted most of Tokyo's fine-dining establishment. At Nodaiwa's Higashi-Azabu honten, the wild unagi still arrives without seasoning — and the booking still runs through a phone line.
The unagi lands closed in its lacquered box, and the first thing that hits is steam — sweet, faintly smoky, unshowy. Lift the lid and the fish is pale where you might expect glazed brown, the flesh nearly white at the flake and the skin barely marked by the grill. This is shirayaki, the house move: steamed long enough to render the fat, then finished over coals without a drop of tare. It is the version of unagi that assumes the fish is worth eating on its own terms.
Nodaiwa has been doing this since the Edo period, and Kanejiro Kanemoto is the fifth generation to run it. He is 97, still active in the kitchen, and picked up the Michelin Mentor Chef Award in the 2026 Tokyo guide — the oldest working chef the guide currently recognises anywhere. The honten sits on a quiet Higashi-Azabu block ten minutes' walk from Tokyo Tower, which is the kind of coordinate that keeps the room away from the Roppongi and Ginza churn without hiding it. One Michelin star in the 2026 Tokyo guide, the same one it has had for years.
A specialist counter that has kept its focus for five generations, and a fifth-generation chef who at 97 is still the reason to book it.
Editorial Deep
The shirayaki arrives first in the memory even when it arrives second on the plate. The fish is pale, the skin lightly bronzed rather than lacquered, and the flavour is eel — clean, slightly minerally, the fat rendered down to something closer to butter than to oil. Without tare there is nowhere for the kitchen to hide, and the wild eel does the work. A pinch of wasabi and salt on the side is all the seasoning offered and all it needs.
Conversation at a normal volume works, and two people across a table can speak without leaning in. The honten is quiet in the way older Tokyo rooms are quiet — no music, no open kitchen noise reaching the guest, the soft clatter of lacquerware and the occasional slide of a screen. It is the acoustic of a place that assumes you came to eat.
The Michelin listing says the restaurant manages its own bookings and asks guests to contact the restaurant directly. In practice that means one thing: pick up the phone. There is no Pocket Concierge page, no Omakase.in slot, no TableCheck link, no online form. Call +81 3-3583-7852, in Japanese if you can and through a hotel concierge if you cannot — a good Tokyo concierge is the reliable route for a non-Japanese speaker here and worth using. Reservations require a minimum of two people, and a two-top will be routed to the annex rather than the main room; if that matters, book three. Lunch is the easier service to land and, as with most of Tokyo's starred rooms, the more forgiving on the bill. Book as far ahead as you can — this is not a same-week table.
The cheapest visit that would still count as eating well here is a weekday lunch set with the house unagi. It is the version of the meal that puts the wild eel and the shirayaki technique in front of a diner without asking them to commit to a full evening. For an unagi specialist of this pedigree with a Michelin star in the 2026 Tokyo guide and a Mentor Chef in the kitchen, that lunch price is quietly generous.
The condition currently unmet is the party size. A two-top lands in the annex, and the honten room — the one that carries the history — takes three or more. Return with three, book the main room, and the meal reads differently: the space does more of the work, and the shirayaki lands in the setting the kitchen built for it.
What to eat
Don't miss.
Shirayaki (steamed, then grilled without seasoning) alongside the tare-glazed unagi — the contrast is the argument for coming here
“A five-generation unagi specialist executing at the top of what a one-fish restaurant can do.”
Come at lunch, come with three so the honten room seats you, and order both the shirayaki and the tare-glazed course. If the phone is a hurdle, Obana in Minami-Senju is the other Tokyo unagi table worth crossing town for — different neighbourhood, similar money, no shirayaki tradition of this depth.
The Verdict
