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For our Toyama trip, we specifically set aside a day for a Kanazawa day trip — to visit the king of Spanish cuisine in Hokuriku, Respiración.

The restaurant sits in a townhouse near Ōmichō Market, Kanazawa’s core food market — a traditional Japanese row house that survived WWII, now over 150 years old.

All three chefs are from Ishikawa Prefecture, friends since kindergarten. They each went out into the world to refine their craft before eventually returning home to open this restaurant together. Kids who grew up together, teaming up to build a business — kind of a cool story.

Respiración means “breathing” in Spanish.

The restaurant aims to showcase Ishikawa’s ingredients through modern Spanish cooking techniques, creating an experience — a space to enjoy, and a style of Spanish cuisine that belongs uniquely to Kanazawa.

It’s a bit like imagining three kids from Xiamen roaming the world and then coming home to open an Italian restaurant built entirely around Fujian ingredients.

Impact shrimp | Sweet shrimp

The opening sweet shrimp has been a signature dish since the restaurant opened — the shrimp head made into a gel, the shell turned into a tart shell, the flesh lightly cured with shio koji.

The pleasure of that freshness hits straight to the brain — that bright tension unique to crustaceans. Sweet and slightly chewy, it reassembles a Hokuriku specialty in a new form. It demands enough freshness from the ingredient itself — a piece of molecular gastronomy that’s strictly local to Kanazawa.

Mar | Hokki clam

A large surf clam grilled over charcoal, paired with local vegetables like Kanazawa cucumber, seaweed, and apple — a local take on ceviche, essentially.

Plenty of herbal aroma, crunch, and acidity, tied together with a coating of butter.

Setas | Maitake mushroom

Hokuriku’s maitake mushrooms were exactly in season, so the restaurant simply brought out a giant whole maitake to the table. The maitake itself was made into a cookie and a pudding.

Beneath the fig sat a peanut mousse and maitake soup — a heavy, enveloping bomb of umami that opens up layer by layer. A touch of peanut kombucha runs through it, its bright acidity adding another memorable note.

The wine pairing here was a 1996 vintage aged Tedorigawa sake — gorgeous, bold, and unexpectedly well-balanced in freshness.

A few years ago the restaurant joined a sustainability program, and you can genuinely see that philosophy reflected in some of the dishes.

For example, they use leftover bread each day as feed to cultivate their own house-made miso, which seasons part of this dish’s ravioli. The venison you’ll have later also uses a stock made from bones.

Calamar | Red squid / yellow tomato

Red squid from Kanazawa port, using only the middle section, aged for three days to concentrate both texture and sweetness. White shrimp sits on top, adding a fresh, chewy lift.

A yellow tomato sauce made from mountain-foraged tomatoes was genuinely a bit bitter. The sweetness of the wine pairing ended up amplifying the dried squid’s fishiness instead of masking it.

In between courses, the restaurant’s own house-baked bread arrived — a plain loaf made with a 15-grain mixed yeast, beautifully bubbled and complex yet balanced to chew.

No butter was offered for dipping — instead, a white sauce made from goat milk and cloudy sake, where the milkiness and umami kept each other in check.

Oso | Kaga renkon (lotus root) / bear

Bear caught in Mt. Hakusan made into a ragù, paired with seasonal lotus root and charcoal-grilled eggplant purée until soft.

The explosively powerful meaty aroma was caught and softened by cream, the whole dish tender yet full of tension. A faint smokiness and vegetal note ran through the middle. It hit like a punch, followed by wave after wave of more flavor, with a lingering, concentrated finish.

Pescado | Tilefish

Fukui tilefish, paired with a northern Spanish Peli Peli sauce (essentially a chili sauce, though it wasn’t spicy at all here). The white sauce on top used fish bone stock and cauliflower, plus some fresh yuzu and charred yuzu peel.

Thoroughly, completely fishy. A total wipeout.

It was paired with a SAYS FARM Sauvignon Blanc, which actually worked well — I’ll let you imagine why.

Plum, rose vinegar

Carne | Venison

Hokkaido young venison, taken from the back, paired with a sauce made from vegetable scraps left over from the rest of the menu. The offal, meanwhile, was mixed with spices and fried into a venison ball.

There was nothing technically wrong with it, but it played things so safe that it lost any real memorability. The vegetable sauce, for instance, had nothing particularly striking about its seasoning — it felt more like the chef fulfilling the restaurant’s wish for “sustainability” than anything else.

The sense of ceremony far outweighed the actual result.

Paella | Snow crab

Softshell turtle risotto

Respiración’s menu always includes a seafood rice dish year-round, changing with the season.

By October it was snow crab — but this is already an inherently heavily-seasoned dish, and Respiración’s version leaned weak on umami and heavy on sauce, honestly not all that delicious.

The hidden-menu softshell turtle risotto, on the other hand, was savory and soft, genuinely comforting —

— yes, compared to a proper risotto, it’s really more like a bowl of softshell turtle congee.

Cedro | Noto cedar

Pera | Pear / hōrenkuzu

Dessert was a pleasant surprise — the two components didn’t seem to have a main and a supporting role. One was rich and full-bodied, the other fresh and sweet; from a single ingredient, pear, four different textures were pulled out.

Add a final cup of herbal tea, and you get a genuinely memorable freshness, a real palate reset. The restaurant put in some thoughtful touches to send guests off feeling settled.

Looking back carefully on the meal at Respiración, it genuinely draws on a lot of modern Spanish cooking techniques, but because the ingredients are rooted in Kanazawa and Ishikawa Prefecture, the overall flavor profile gives a completely different experience from Spanish cuisine itself.

As for the “Spanish” part, it mostly comes through in the bold reimagining and combination of fresh ingredients, along with the application of sustainability principles.

The localization concept came through fully — if there’s one thing to nitpick, it’s that the seasoning was restrained to the point of being a bit too conservative.

The service’s sense of distance and pacing, the sommelier’s relaxed delivery paired with a high degree of matching precision, are worth remembering — along with tiny details like providing dedicated chopsticks for left-handed guests (distinguished by the direction of the logo), which genuinely add points for rigor and professionalism.

Looking forward to a return visit in a few years~

Respiración

67 Hakuroumachi, Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture

Lunch / Dinner

¥20,000 – ¥29,999

https://respiracion.jp/

Closed 6 days a month

On Tabelog, the number one restaurant in all of Japan is Katatori, in Kanazawa.

And legend has it there’s a restaurant that has surpassed even its own master — also in Kanazawa, run by a former apprentice of Katatori: Kisatsuki.

Kisatsuki opened in April 2025, and by January of the following year it had already been awarded a 🥈 Silver at the Tabelog Awards, landing at a striking 4.53 rating — 28th in all of Japan.

Chef Kisatsuki Kosei left Kyushu at 17, and went on to train at a Kyoto ryotei, at Tsurukō in Kanazawa, at Ishikawa in Kagurazaka, and finally at Katatori. After nearly 17 years of accumulated experience, he finally struck out on his own, opening his restaurant on the second-to-last day of Aries season in 2025.

It truly lives up to half a lifetime of learning. At his counter, everything is clean, precise, and yet never loses its sense of ease. The delicacy of Kyoto, the local character of Kanazawa, and the high craft of contemporary Japanese cuisine are all quietly gathered at a counter that seats just seven.

A small bowl of soup to start, made with pan-seared Noto shiitake, fragrant and gentle on entry. Two sips and it’s gone, followed right after by a shot of local Ishikawa sake to open the appetite — hands rubbing together, ready to begin.

The meal proper opens with mountain vegetables at their most seasonal — beneath a maki ebi sits a large, tender green cube that turns out to be tofu made from parsley, delicately soft with a touch of viscosity, its distinctly plant-like fragrance building with every bite.

Late spring into early summer is exactly when Noto cockles are at their best. Lightly seared, carrying a firm crunch and high sweetness, resting on rice porridge — it’s instantly, solidly anchored.

Ingenious cooking applied to local ingredients — the equation of 1+1>2 solved correctly.

After showing off one round of the soft, harmonious pairing of local seafood and vegetables in a scorpionfish bowl dish, the chef opened up a stage entirely devoted to Himi’s seafood.

All caught that very morning, and even the way they’re handled at the counter is a kind of aesthetic statement. Squid curled into elegant frills, horse mackerel taken only from its richest, fattiest middle section, each portion piled like a small mountain…

But it’s only once you taste it that you realize the plain-looking madako — er, magochi (flathead) — is actually the most talented of them all. Beyond its soft, tender bite, what lingers in the mouth is, remarkably, like a clear spring. Clean, with a touch of minerality, and a very refreshing sweetness — like sitting by a stream and cupping a handful of mountain spring water.

Of course the horse mackerel, with its rich fat and gorgeous translucent pink, was beautifully sweet too — but if there’s a single best fish guest at this meal, it has to be the magochi, even if its Chinese name translates roughly to “dog-leg fish.” (?)

Once the sashimi section passes, the chef stops showing off technique altogether and hands the whole space over to the guests to simply enjoy the food — yet the sense of awe never lets up.

After a few rounds of monkfish tempura at certain Tokyo restaurants, I’d grown somewhat dismissive of the dish, tired of how much jaw work it demanded. I was already complaining to myself before the first bite even went down.

— But this particular monkfish was worth an entire lifetime.

The outer layer fried impossibly crisp, while the fish inside stayed beautifully plump and tender, still carrying a clear, delicate sense of muscle. The moment you bite through, sweetness spills out along with the juices, and the aroma opens right up with it. Not a trace of heaviness — a richness handled with extraordinary precision. Monkfish tempura, it turns out, can reach this level — enough to make you rethink the entire dish.

Then sweet peas paired with onion — unexpectedly, a single spoonful revealed the onion still holding some structure, its completely different sweetness and aroma layering with the peas’ own in the dashi, full of the atmosphere of late spring drifting into early summer.

The surprising thing was probably the oysters — beyond their sheer size, the flavor was also a strike against everything you thought you knew. Maybe it was good luck, but they were plump enough to carry a faintly fish-fat-like aroma, and yet slicker and softer than fish itself, unfurling especially beautifully in the mouth.

The tilefish, meanwhile, lightly smoked over firewood and wearing a slightly ashen, “mud-child” exterior, once again delivered that clear-spring sense within its fish aroma, along with an especially memorable sweetness. Clean, yet anything but simple.

Stunning enough to make you wonder if Kisatsuki’s ingredients have been secretly enchanted…!

Fried tofu skin wrapped around mizuna, looking on the outside like a little white rabbit, and still a perfect answer on the inside. The vegetable itself sweet and crisp, releasing a slightly sticky softness the moment you bite through, at which point the aroma and firmness of the outer tofu skin steps in right on cue to carry the flavor forward. A tiny roll, and yet it holds command over every single moment in the mouth.

The sakura trout, meanwhile, was “rolled” together with cucumber, egg crepe, and ginger into another kind of clean, refreshing feel, its flavors meshing together just right. There are so many ways to prepare sakura trout, and more often than not people keep adding to it. But here, plant ingredients are used instead to make its fish aroma even cleaner, leaving behind a distinctly memorable impression.

The staple course offered five choices in total. First, a bowl of plain white rice, paired with simmered beef shigure-ni and wild boar miso. After that came horse mackerel, onion, fried monkfish, and egg, with portions adjustable to your own appetite and each one generously sized, however modest or indulgent you wanted to go.

The horse mackerel and monkfish, already moving on their own earlier, found yet another way to work once folded into the rice course. Carried by the rice, their savory aroma felt even more complete, and the sense of satisfaction climbed right along with it. But just when the meal seemed to be nearing its end, Kisatsuki pulled off one more trick — using a single 🥚 to pull everyone into an entirely different world.

The yolk sat obediently atop the rice, while the white had been whipped into foam, its fuwa airiness instantly lightening the whole bowl. Halfway through, a generous handful of bonito flakes was piled on top, and the gentle chewing released the yolk’s aroma slowly outward. What looked like a simple bowl of egg-topped rice turned out, once in the mouth, to be an entirely different kind of surprise.

The meal closed with a mugwort red-bean rice ball. Its plant character came through clearly, the red bean paste silky, the proportions well-judged. A gentle, satisfying end to the meal.

It’s hard to imagine that over a rapidly passing two and a half hours, we experienced, again and again, a kind of “pure-flavor strike” that kept exceeding what we thought we already knew about certain ingredients. This isn’t a place relying only on raw preparations, or on culinary minimalism to underline the ingredients — it’s a place using precisely calibrated seasoning to keep manufacturing one 1+1>2 combination after another.

Kisatsuki obviously has a deep understanding of local seafood, but it also borrows the technique of kaiseki cuisine to amplify the ingredients’ own strengths — especially the specific character of Ishikawa Prefecture’s produce.

About two years ago, I actually took a trip through the Toyama and Ishikawa area.

But what Kisatsuki brought was almost an entirely new understanding — a sheer, cliff-edge leap upward.

Between dishes this delicate and yet this direct, something hard to put into words takes shape — a kind of awe, a kind of quiet emotion. Because of Kisatsuki, you find yourself thinking: Ishikawa really is wonderful. This sea really is wonderful (to eat from).

A ten-hour round trip just for this meal — exhausting, and entirely worth it.

Looking forward to next time, to seeing Kanazawa’s four seasons through Kisatsuki’s cooking.

Kisatsuki

15-3 Tokiwa-machi, Kanazawa City, Ishikawa Prefecture

Omakase Menu ¥40,000+