If there’s one restaurant in Tokyo that’s notoriously hard to book but absolutely worth chasing, acá 1° tops that list.

Spanish cuisine that moved from Kyoto — since opening in 2013, it has held a Tabelog Gold Award for seven years running (barring closures and other exceptions) 👈 in Japan, that carries more weight than a Michelin star.

With fewer than ten seats at the counter, it’s been a brutally hard reservation from the moment people started noticing it.

In an interview, acá 1°’s chef, Tetsuo Higashi, once said he wants to make food people love using simple ingredients and a direct approach to cooking.

“Be the kind of straightforward guy who blows people away.” I think that translation holds up well enough here.

Sawara (Spanish mackerel)

The first thing that hit me was just how small acá 1° is.

Small enough that the counter runs on four people total. The sommelier and manager handle the guests while the head chef and sous chef work the charcoal fire, prepping the day’s dishes.

Lightly seared sawara, clean fat with real depth, smoke and tenderness both perfectly judged. Tucked into a cluster of greens was a hint of sansho leaf — a small but standout note.

Not the kind of flashy opener that makes you gasp on sight, but one that grows on you, quietly delicious in retrospect.

Signature konoshiro with fried bread

Tomato bread paired with silver-skinned fish always brings to mind the sardines or anchovies common in Spanish tapas.

But here they skip the Spanish habit of oil-cured tinned fish, using fresh, lightly cured konoshiro with just a touch of olive oil instead. The fish stays whole, beautiful, firm.

The bread is fried but keeps a slightly soft bite, which lets it meld better with the fish. The tomato’s natural acidity and umami pair perfectly with the cured konoshiro — that’s the moment I understood Tokiwa’s tomato shari.

Shiso and herbs bookend it inside and out — umami, acidity, and a faint green freshness woven together, layered and beautiful.

Sanma risotto

“Please squeeze out as much juice as you can. 🍋”

This year is famously a bumper year for sanma (Pacific saury), and at acá 1° that shows up as sanma risotto. Two ingredients both rich in their own fat, layered together — surprisingly, they meld rather than compete.

The fish oil’s aroma builds with every chew beneath the rice’s surface. The lemon juice you can’t see is truly the soul that pulls the whole dish together.

Fried ayu wrapped in a soy crepe

The next course is fried ayu (sweetfish) rolled in a soy crepe — a roe-bearing ayu tucked satisfyingly inside its own belly. The lightly sweet sauce turns out to be rich when you think back on it: sherry and sake lees bring a complex acidity, fermented depth, caramel, and nutty notes.

Wrapped around the outside like a scarf are sansho leaves and scallion whites, and the crepe itself carries a faint bean fragrance. The first bite might remind you of Peking duck, but it’s elevated in both satisfaction and complexity.

Kuruma shrimp and shark fin

I didn’t expect the most stunning shark fin I’d have all year to come from a Spanish restaurant in Japan. Look closely and there’s a lot of thinking packed into that small pot.

Shark fin and kuruma shrimp are both prized, representative ingredients in China and Japan respectively, while garlic-and-olive-oil shrimp is a beloved dish across Spain. Here they drop the garlic, keeping all the sweetness of the shrimp heads and shells locked into the oil, then lightly coat the shark fin with that fragrance.

Texturally, it holds a very precise line between the crisp snap of the kuruma shrimp and the springy tenderness of the shark fin. A small piece of bread is left at the end, just right for soaking up the last of the shrimp oil.

A pot of premium ingredients brought together with no sense of excess — pure, and delicious.

Iberico ham and matsutake broth

Ham broth paired with finely julienned, large matsutake — it’s yanduxian, the classic Shanghainese ham-and-bamboo-shoot soup, reimagined in another register. Salty, sweet, savory, crisp, without a trace of excess seasoning — every bit of the aroma comes purely from the ingredients themselves.

Whether it’s the previous course’s kuruma shrimp and shark fin or the matsutake julienne that follows, both are dishes whose texture is extremely sensitive to temperature.

But at the acá 1° counter, all of that is clearly already anticipated with precision. Even sitting in a bubbling pot of oil, right up to the moment it reaches your mouth, every ingredient stays exactly at its most perfect state.

Kobe beef — sirloin with roasted peppers | tenderloin with black pepper paste

The main course is wagyu; at the start of the meal, guests are asked to choose their own portion. Some couldn’t finish 30g, while the heartiest eater at the table went as high as 90g.

The color of the meat alone tells you how beautiful the tenderness is; the seasoning and sides differ slightly between the two cuts, and even the knives used are distinguished accordingly — beyond what you taste, the other four senses keep getting quietly activated by small details the restaurant has designed in.

A glass of sherry was added along the way, and the female sommelier’s confident pour was genuinely impressive. A great restaurant doesn’t just take care of its guests — it also lets them randomly trigger the staff’s hidden skills over the course of the meal.

Hairy crab Spanish-style seafood rice

The final dish, hairy crab paella, has been acá 1°’s unchanging signature since its Kyoto days.

Take a first bite as is, then squeeze lemon, add garlic sauce, and the shrimp oil saved specially from the shark fin course. One pot of rice, four layered ways to taste it, all left for the guest to explore.

A rich, showy, playful, high-impact staple. My favorite moment is right after a generous spoon of shrimp oil goes in — the freshness turns gorgeous, and the acidity from the garlic sauce and lemon threads through every grain. A little sinful, maybe, but as the saying goes—

“Well, you’re already here.”

Pear

Goat cheese and black fig

For dessert, a seasonal pear arrives first to cleanse the palate. At the counter, the chef unhurriedly starts brewing tea and pour-over coffee himself, occasionally stepping over to flip the figs on the charcoal fire and give them a sear.

As a guest at this counter, you genuinely feel attended to in every single moment.

Goat cheese ice cream and black fig — both ingredients with a strong, distinctive aroma of their own, yet somehow what comes through in this dish is a clean, powerful restraint.

It brings out the goat cheese’s rich milkiness, along with the concentrated sweetness of figs in season, while the caramel draped over the top adds a crisp touch of bitterness — perfect.

There’s no question the experience at acá 1° leaves a deep impression. I wouldn’t even want to evaluate it on something as simple as “how good the food tastes.”

At this counter, it’s not just about watching the chef perform solo — it feels more like being invited by every staff member at the counter into their world, a fully immersive show. Get into the exchange and you’ll find every performer at the counter is a versatile all-rounder capable of surprising you.

As for the food itself, it’s simple but never simplistic. Using Spanish cooking’s seemingly straightforward approach, the chef draws out a different side of Japanese ingredients.

The restaurant’s command over its output can only be described as frightening. Heat loss or gain caused by serving vessels is the excuse countless restaurants use to explain away “an off day,” but at acá 1°’s counter, the food arrives with an almost calculated precision.

Complete, balanced, elegant, comfortable, satisfying… I think even someone with the weakest vocabulary would find a string of compliments spilling out after this meal. From start to finish, every second of emotion at this table was carefully accounted for.

A rightfully deserved number one in Japan for Western cuisine / Spanish cuisine / non-traditional Japanese dining (yes, you read that right — it’s number one across all three).

アカ (aca 1°)

2-1-1 Muromachi, Chuo City, Tokyo, Mitsui Building No. 2

Monday – Saturday

5:00 PM – 11:00 PM

http://aca-kyoto.jp/

Tasting Menu 60,000 JPY ++