Where Nordic Light Meets Japanese Shadow: Kaiseki Alchemy at Yamazato

There are collaborations born of convenience, and then there are those born of quiet necessity. The dinner last week at Yamazato belongs firmly to the latter. Titled Kaiseki Alchemy, it brings together two chefs who, on paper, operate in different culinary universes—yet in practice, share a common language of restraint, seasonality, and precision.

Chef Bin Wang of The Georg in Beijing wears a Michelin star lightly. His cooking is a whisper: Nordic clarity applied to Japanese ingredients, with an almost architectural attention to texture and silence. Chef Hideaki Hayashi, Yamazato’s executive chef and a Black Pearl One Diamond holder, is a guardian of classical kaiseki—trained in the ritual of omotenashi, where every bowl, every garnish, every temperature shift carries meaning.

Together, they have designed an eight-act menu that never raises its voice but never loses its nerve.

The meal opens with a cured scallop beneath dill oil, pickled baby corn adding a bright, tart crunch. Then a steamed foie gras—defiantly delicate—paired with sour cherry gel and dehydrated brioche, proof that richness need not shout. A clear soup of pike conger follows, threaded with yuzu and turtle-shell mushroom: a masterclass in suimono, where broth becomes meditation.

Three kinds of seasonal sashimi arrive next, pristine and unadorned, accompanied by a crisp Bourgogne Aligoté. Then the sea announces itself: straw-grilled spiny lobster in a yellow wine morel emulsion, smoky, creamy, umami-deep. The land answers with slow-roasted wagyu tenderloin, Awaji onion, black truffle potato, and a perilla mustard sauce that adds a Japanese herbal flicker.

Before dessert, a clay pot of seasoned rice appears—hairy crab, red rockfish, Manganji peppers folded into each grain. 

Dessert is an air-fried banana with dark chocolate, ricotta cream, and pecan ice cream, served with a ten-year-old Tawny Port. A sweet, textured end to a meal built entirely on texture and restraint.

This is not fireworks cooking. It is the opposite: a dinner that asks you to lean in, to listen, to taste the space between flavours.