Before visiting Asanuma, I was curious.

A small counter in Nihonbashi, opened in 2022, already twice awarded Tabelog’s 🥈 Silver. In a craft as steeped in lineage as tempura — one that so easily conjures images of old-school artisans — young Asanuma stands out as unusually self-made.

Think of it simply: self-taught, and now ranked third in Tokyo.

Chef Takemu Asanuma was born in 1994. At 18, straight out of high school, he left Yamagata for Tokyo and joined Ginza Tenichi, working later at its Imperial Hotel and Nihonbashi Takashimaya locations — before striking out entirely on his own.

His style is unambiguous: tempura built around the batter.

The coating is adjusted for each ingredient, fried in sesame oil, so that batter, ingredient, and the dipping tentsuyu come together as one flavor.

The meal opens straight into shrimp — 🦐🍤🍤.

First, a golden shrimp toast: bread wrapped around shrimp paste, crackling shell giving way to a tender shrimp cake beneath. Fried fragrant on the outside without losing softness inside — the crisp-to-tender contrast lands immediately.

Then two pieces of fried shrimp proper: eaten plain, you taste the shrimp’s own sweetness; with a touch of salt, the sweetness sharpens; dipped in tentsuyu, another layer of savoriness appears. I preferred the latter — the batter here draws out the best of the sauce.

The same held for the sillago. The crisp batter, dipped in tentsuyu, delivered enough aroma and umami, while the fish beneath stayed fine and soft. The fish itself wasn’t premium, but the batter alone carried the dish.

Vegetables felt like the real battleground.

An eggplant, faintly crisp on the outside, plump and moist within — as though it had just been steamed beneath its coating. Break through the shell and the flesh opens up in the mouth; a touch of salt is all it needs.

The mushroom was excellent too. Very tender, with a slight crispness, releasing a little juice with each bite — sweetness and umami unfolding slowly. Nothing loud about the aroma, just quiet, comfortable eating.

Corn 🌽

The highlight of the entire meal. Simple, and stunning.

Fruit corn layered over sweet corn, bound together under a thin batter and fried just to doneness. Different textures of juiciness and sweet crunch, with full corn aroma. A thin layer of batter cleverly folds two separate categories of produce into one bite.

Unforgettable — I could’ve eaten ten more.

The bell pepper deserves mention too.

Normally, a “good” bell pepper means “crisp.”

But fried here, it turns almost gooey. A bit of batter left in the center, together with the flesh, comes out soft and fragrant.

By this point, Asanuma’s understanding of vegetables is clearly something — the moisture of the eggplant, the tenderness of the mushroom, the sweet crunch of the corn, and now the pepper rendered soft in its own particular way.

Back to seafood: tilefish, clam, and squid.

Ingredient freshness isn’t really the strength here, within what a Silver-level shop implies. But the technique still produces a few memorable moments.

The squid, for instance, had a firm, chewy bite with a hint of translucent rareness still left at the center — thickness and texture both on point, while the middle stayed tender. The cooking was handled beautifully.

The scallop was more straightforward — very sweet, very tender, with good freshness. Lightened batter let the simple satisfaction of good ingredients come through.

But eating tempura this way — if the straightforward pleasure and richness keep stacking up one after another — the back half of the meal starts to push back.

Case in point: the end of the meal. Both the small potato and the conger eel came out with batter that felt heavy-handed — a little thick, a little greasy. The tendon rice bowl that followed only piled on the pressure.

Overall, the highlights stayed with the vegetables, and there was real thought behind the batter — but the seafood itself wasn’t quite good enough. Plenty of ideas and technique, not enough in the ingredients.

Even the service felt a little baffling at points — a dish I’d explicitly declined somehow got added anyway, and when I asked, given a hazy sake list, for “a glass that pairs well with the food,” what came back was a completely unrelated bottle being pushed hard.

Not a great look.

Then, judging purely on the cooking itself —

a single dish’s execution can be beautiful, but a full meal doesn’t necessarily hold up the same way. The novelty and momentum of the first half never carried through to the end — instead, oil, batter, and fullness just kept piling up in the throat.

It starts delicious, and ends somewhere far less so.

Worth trying once. That’s enough 😈.

Tempura Asanuma

Monday–Tuesday & Thursday–Sunday

12:00 / 18:00

Chef’s Menu ¥19,000 ++