Founded by a cosmetics company in 1973. Named after the willow trees that once lined Ginza's streets. Designed by Pierre-Yves Rochon. Eight consecutive Michelin three-stars. And a kitchen built on the conviction that beauty and food are expressions of the same impulse — which, at L'Osier, is not a slogan but a daily practice.

First Impressions


The entrance door bears a camellia in bronze. A glass willow tree greets you inside.


The Tokyo Ginza Shiseido Building on Namiki-dori — the high-fashion boulevard that runs parallel to the main Ginza Chuo-dori — was designed by the Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill and is known locally as the "Lighthouse of Ginza." The building's red brick exterior references the Ginza Brick Town of the Meiji era, and the bronze camellia flowers worked into the entrance door — the camellia is the emblem of Shiseido — establish from the first touch what kind of institution you are entering: one that has thought about beauty continuously since 1872 and has applied that attention to every surface it controls.


L'Osier occupies the ground and first floors. When the doors open, guests are greeted by a glass artwork depicting a willow tree — osier, in French, the name of the restaurant, named for the willow trees that once symbolised Ginza before the city grew around them. The dining room itself was designed by Pierre-Yves Rochon — the Parisian interior architect responsible for the Four Seasons George V in Paris, The Savoy in London, and other grand-hotel spaces of the highest European register — around five keywords: white, gold, transparency, glass, and light. The result is a nine-metre-high atrium that floods the room with light from above, white surfaces that reflect it without harshness, gold accents that warm the space without gilding it, and the specific quality of openness that Rochon describes as "pureness, simplicity, and sophistication" — the three qualities he associates with Shiseido.


The private dining salon, which seats ten, contains Aubusson tapestries by Sonia Delaunay and sculptures by René Lalique. The main dining room contains a Salvador Dalí glass paste figure, a Jean Cocteau vase, a bronze by Axel Cassel, a mirror by Jean Mayodon, and a desk and stool by Maurice Jallot. On the tables: show plates designed by Rochon and made by Haviland, the French Limoges manufacturer. Cutlery from Puiforcat — 900 pieces in the restaurant's collection, the finest Puiforcat collection owned by any restaurant in Japan, maintained since 1999 and used at every service. Table linen from D. Porthault, with a "rising champagne bubbles" motif designed by Rochon specifically for L'Osier, changed in 2013 and unchanged since. The room is not performatively beautiful. It is the kind of beautiful that comes from decades of specific and consistent choices.

Fifty Years of French Cuisine In Ginza


A pharmacy. A soda fountain. A restaurant. A three-star institution. The same address for over a century.


Shiseido was founded in 1872 as Japan's first private Western-style pharmacy, at the site that now holds the Tokyo Ginza Shiseido Building. Its founder, Arinobu Fukuhara, visited the Paris Exposition in 1900 and returned via the United States, where he saw the American drugstore soda fountain. He imported the complete system — machine, glasses, straws, spoons, syrup — and installed it in his Ginza pharmacy in 1902, producing Japan's first soda water and ice cream. The soda fountain became a Ginza institution. In 1928, it evolved into Shiseido Parlour: a restaurant serving authentic Western cuisine, one of the first in Japan, making Shiseido as significant a pioneer of Western food culture in Japan as it was of Western beauty culture.


L'Osier opened in 1973, on the seventh and eighth floors of the Shiseido Parlour building on Ginza Chuo-dori, as the company's most ambitious statement of what French cuisine in Tokyo could be. The name — the French word for willow — was chosen in tribute to the willow trees that had once symbolised Ginza. In 1986, the restaurant underwent a transformation: Yoshiharu Fukuhara, then Shiseido's president and a passionate lover of French culture, brought Jacques Borie — recipient of the Meilleur Ouvrier de France award, arrived from the Hôtel de Crillon and the Grand Véfour in Paris — to take over as chef. Borie rebuilt the kitchen from its foundations, redesigned the tableware, and turned L'Osier into something that earned its first serious international recognition. The restaurant became, in Borie's fifteen years, the definition of what French fine dining in Japan could aspire to be.


  • (1872) Shiseido Founded in Ginza — Japan's first private Western-style pharmacy, established by Arinobu Fukuhara at the site that now holds the Tokyo Ginza Shiseido Building. The founding philosophy: not simply dispensing medicine but expressing a belief that beauty, wellness, and culture are inseparable.


  • (1902) Japan's First Soda Fountain — Fukuhara installs a soda fountain — imported entirely from America, machine and glasses and straws and syrups — in the corner of his pharmacy. Ginza's first ice cream. The beginning of Shiseido's food culture, which would eventually produce L'Osier.


  • (1928) Shiseido Parlour Opens — The soda fountain evolves into a full Western restaurant — one of the first in Japan to serve authentic Western cuisine. Shiseido becomes simultaneously Japan's leading cosmetics company and one of its leading Western food pioneers.


  • (1973) L'Osier Founded — Named for the willow trees that once lined Ginza's streets, L'Osier opens on the seventh and eighth floors of the Shiseido Parlour building as an authentic French restaurant — Shiseido's most ambitious culinary statement.


  • (1986) Chef Jacques Borie Arrives — Meilleur Ouvrier de France, formerly of the Hôtel de Crillon and the Grand Véfour. Borie rebuilds the kitchen and the restaurant's culinary identity, establishing L'Osier as a grand maison in the serious French tradition. The first generation of what the restaurant would become.


  • (1999) Move to Namiki-dori — L'Osier moves to the new Shiseido headquarters building on Ginza Namiki-dori, the high-fashion boulevard. The interior is redesigned; the Puiforcat cutlery collection (900 pieces) is installed. The address becomes one of the most prestigious in Japanese fine dining.


  • (2005-2010) Chef Bruno Ménard — Three Stars, Then Renovation — Bruno Ménard, the second generation, earns three Michelin stars. In 2010, the restaurant closes for renovation — three stars suspended, the building rebuilt around it. The closure lasts three years. When it reopens in 2013, everything has changed except the mission.



  • (2013-Present) Chef Olivier Chaignon — The Third Generation — Born in Montargis, France, 1978. Taillevent, Pierre Gagnaire Paris, Pierre Gagnaire Tokyo. Takes over as executive chef and spends six years rebuilding toward three stars. First prize Young Apprentice Chef France, 1996. Gault & Millau Chef of the Year 2017. Three stars regained 2019. Eight consecutive since. La Liste 98.00 points (2024 and 2025). Chevalier of the French Order of Agricultural Merit, 2024.
Beauty as a Philosophy of Food


A cosmetics company's conviction that beauty and food are the same impulse expressed differently.


Shiseido's corporate mission is "Beauty Innovations for a Better World" — a phrase that, in most corporate contexts, would function as aspirational marketing language. At L'Osier, it is a specific operating principle. The restaurant exists because Shiseido's founders believed that the pursuit of beauty — in skin, in space, in food — is a single continuous impulse rather than a collection of separate businesses. The soda fountain in 1902, the restaurant in 1928, L'Osier in 1973: each is an expression of the same conviction that Ginza deserved a place where beauty was practised at the highest level available, regardless of the medium.


This conviction produces a restaurant that is unlike any equivalent in Paris or London. The French grand maison tradition — the white tablecloths, the Puiforcat silver, the classical French cooking, the art on the walls — is present and uncompromised. But the specific combination of Japanese precision, Japanese craft, Japanese ingredient relationships, and the Shiseido aesthetic sensibility produces something that the French tradition alone cannot. The Edo-Kiriko cut glass on the table was made in Tokyo. The Urushi lacquerware serving pieces were made in Kanazawa. The blue ceramic plates were made in Kyoto and Arita. The menu changes every six to eight weeks with the Japanese seasons, responding to Hokkaido seafood in one season and Alba truffles in another, treating the Japanese agricultural calendar with the same seriousness that the French tradition reserves for Brittany and the Périgord.


This was one of the first French restaurants in Japan and is representative of the French art du vivre. The kitchen combines what the sea gives us with what the mountains give us — from the coastlines of Brittany, from Kyoto's markets, from Hokkaido's fishing boats. The cuisine is French. But only here, in Ginza, could it be this particular version of French.

OLIVIER CHAIGNON, EXECUTIVE CHEF


Chef Chaignon travels regularly throughout Japan to deepen relationships with producers — line-caught seafood from Hokkaido, organic biodynamic vegetables from farms that supply only a handful of Tokyo's finest restaurants, Aveyron lamb flown from France for specific preparations, Alba truffles during season. He also participates in Femmes de Monde, a charitable organisation that allows the restaurant to take a more sustainable approach to sourcing its tea and spices. The kitchen's 44 chefs are in the restaurant by 8:30am each morning, preparing the afternoon's and evening's service. The menu changes every six to eight weeks. The abalone has never left.

The Room and Its Objects


Pierre-Yves Rochon designed it. Dalí, Delaunay, and Lalique live inside it.


The dining room is not a conventional restaurant interior. It is a curated space in which French art history, Japanese craft tradition, and Shiseido's aesthetic sensibility have been assembled over decades into something that functions simultaneously as a gallery, a cabinet of curiosities, and the most formal expression of hospitality available in Tokyo. Every object was chosen — by Rochon, by Shiseido, by the chefs and hospitality directors who have stewarded the restaurant across fifty years — with the specificity that the rest of the operation applies to its food.


Salvador Dali · 1904-1989 — "Venus with Drawers" — Glass Paste & Silver


A Dalí glass paste and silver sculpture in the dining room — not a reproduction, not a print, but an object from one of the 20th century's most significant artists, present in a room where lunch is served. The surrealist logic of drawers in a human torso reads, in this context, as a statement about the unexpected depths of everyday pleasure.


Sonia Delaunay · 1885-1979 — Aubusson Tapestries — Hand-woven Wool


Delaunay, one of the most important figures of the Art Deco movement, is represented by Aubusson tapestries in both the main dining room and the private dining salon. The handmade wool tapestries carry the specific warmth of objects made by hand over many months, and the specific dignity of works by an artist who understood colour as a form of architecture.


René Lalique · 1860-1945 — Antique Candle Stand — Glass


An antique candle stand by Lalique, the glass designer who defined the Art Deco movement's relationship to light and material. In a room designed around "transparency, glass, and light," a Lalique object is not a coincidence but a statement of alignment: the restaurant's aesthetic and the artist's are the same conversation, conducted across a century.


Jean Cocteau · 1889-1963 — Vase — Glass Paste


Cocteau, one of the most multi-talented artists of the 20th century — poet, novelist, filmmaker, draughtsman, ceramicist — made a small body of glass paste work that is among the least-known and most beautiful of his output. A vase from his hand, in this room, is the kind of object that rewards the guest who notices it and considers what it means that it is here.


Puiforcat · Founded Paris 1820 — 900 Pieces of Cutlery — Sterling Silver


Puiforcat, the French silversmith founded in 1820 and considered among the finest in the world, supplies the restaurant's entire cutlery collection: 900 pieces, of a quality and rarity that Puiforcat itself describes as museum-standard. L'Osier holds the largest Puiforcat collection of any restaurant in Japan. It has been maintained daily, used at every service, since 1999.


D. Porthault · Paris · Since 1920 — Table Linen — "Champagne Bubbles" Motif


D. Porthault's linen — used by Marilyn Monroe, Catherine Deneuve, and Jacqueline Kennedy — has been the restaurant's table linen since 1986. The current "champagne bubbles" motif was designed by Pierre-Yves Rochon specifically for L'Osier during the 2013 renovation, woven in the Porthault studio in Cambrai, northern France.

The Cuisine


French technique. Japanese precision. The abalone as the clearest argument for this combination.


The kitchen at L'Osier operates on classical French technique applied to the finest ingredients available globally and regionally — Hokkaido line-caught seafood, biodynamic vegetables from Japanese organic farms, Aveyron lamb, seasonal truffles from Alba, and the specific Japanese ingredients that Chaignon has spent twelve years learning to use as seriously as his French training taught him to use their European equivalents. The menu changes every six to eight weeks; a handful of dishes have become signatures because they are the clearest expression of what this kitchen does that no other kitchen can replicate.


Signature · Year-Round — Wild Black Abalone Cooked in Its Shell


The restaurant's most iconic dish and its most complete argument for the French-Japanese synthesis: wild black abalone cooked in its shell with sea urchin, vegetables, smoked eel with sansho leaves, and a green sabayon made from the abalone's own liver. The combination of ingredients is entirely Japanese in origin; the technique is classical French; the result is something that belongs to neither tradition and to both simultaneously. Served on a Limoges plate designed by Chaignon specifically for this dish. It has been on the menu in various forms since early in Chaignon's tenure. It is the reason many guests return.


Fish Course — Grilled Tile Fish with Scales Intact


Amadai — Japanese tilefish, one of the most prized fish in Japanese cuisine — grilled with its scales still attached, the scales crisped by the heat until they become translucent and edible, providing a texture that is simultaneously architectural and delicate. This preparation, borrowed from Japanese culinary tradition and executed with French precision, is the second most cited Chaignon dish: a fish that is cooked in a way that French technique does not traditionally allow, because French cooks descale their fish, and Chaignon decided not to.


Poultry Course — Racan Pigeon Rôti



Pigeon from Racan in the Sarthe, France — one of the finest pigeon producers in Europe, whose birds are fed exclusively on grain and raised free-range in the Sarthe valley — roasted to the precise temperature that preserves the specific richness of the breast meat while rendering the confit leg to an entirely different register of tenderness. A classical French preparation, with no Japanese modification: the dish that demonstrates that the kitchen's engagement with Japanese ingredients is a creative expansion, not a displacement of the French tradition that defines the restaurant's identity.


Seasonal · Winter — Tagliolini with White Truffle — Butter & Parmesan


During white truffle season (October to December), the pasta course — fresh tagliolini in a simple butter and Parmesan sauce, finished tableside with generous shavings of Alba white truffle — is the most celebrated seasonal preparation at L'Osier. Chef Chaignon maintains direct relationships with Alba truffle suppliers of the same calibre as his Japanese ingredient sources; the quality of the truffle is consistent with the standard of the rest of the menu, which means it is extraordinary. The simplicity of the preparation — butter, pasta, Parmesan, truffle — is the point.


Starter — Langoustine with Sea Urchin & Scampi Jus


Breton langoustine — the Atlantic crustacean that Chaignon sources from the coastline of his native France — braised with Hokkaido sea urchin and finished with a reduced scampi jus whose sweetness echoes both the langoustine and the urchin's mineral brine. This is the dish that most directly connects the two coasts that define Chaignon's cooking: Brittany, where he grew up, and Hokkaido, where the finest Japanese cold-water seafood originates. The distance between them is 9,000 kilometres. On the plate, it is zero.


Closing · Tableside — The Dessert Trolley


The rolling dessert trolley is one of the last surviving examples of this service in Tokyo's fine dining — a tradition from the grand French restaurants of the 1970s and 1980s, largely abandoned as kitchens modernised. Chaignon redesigned L'Osier's trolley early in his tenure: more layers, for visibility; drawers that align perfectly with the table's edge when opened. The trolley carries handmade chocolates, caramels, marshmallows, nougat, and seasonal mignardises. The tableside theatre of the service — the guest choosing from the array, the sommelier recommending a pairing — is the meal's final gesture. The tradition is worth preserving. Chaignon preserves it.

The Menus


Lunch and dinner, each at a different scale — but the same kitchen.


L'Osier offers three distinct menu formats: a lunch menu, a more complete dinner menu, and the full degustation. All three are expressions of the same kitchen and the same sourcing; the difference is in length and in the number of courses through which Chaignon's current seasonal direction can be expressed. For guests visiting Tokyo with limited time, the lunch menu offers the most accessible entry to a three-star kitchen at a price significantly below the dinner degustation. For guests with more time and appetite, the degustation is the complete L'Osier experience.


Degustation Menu · Multi-Course Dinner — Degustation L'Osier


The complete expression of the kitchen's current seasonal direction — eight to ten courses including all signature preparations, the full trolley service, coffee and mignardises. Three hours minimum. Wine pairing available and strongly recommended: the sommelier team works with a cellar that ranges from Burgundy and Champagne to the finest French and Japanese wine producers, calibrated course by course. This is the meal L'Osier was built to serve.


Full Lunch Menu — Les Belles Gourmandes


The full lunch experience — five to six courses, the kitchen's current seasonal menu in its lunch format, the trolley service, the complete L'Osier atmosphere in the most naturally lit period of the day when the nine-metre atrium is at its most luminous. The correct format for a long lunch in Tokyo at three-star quality without the full commitment of a dinner degustation.


Lunch · Accessible — Menu Déjeuner



The most accessible entry point to the L'Osier kitchen — a shorter lunch menu that gives access to the space, the service, and the kitchen's essential character at a price point considerably below the degustation. Three to four courses. The tableside service, the Puiforcat cutlery, the Rochon room: all present and identical to the degustation experience. The food changes with the menu cycle; the standard does not.

Before You Go


Six things to know before you sit down at L'Osier.


  • Reserve exactly three months in advance for dinner — and book online for the smallest acceptable party size — L'Osier opens reservations three months ahead and fills quickly. For dinner, book as soon as the three-month window opens. Lunch reservations are somewhat easier to secure; if dinner is unavailable, take the full Les Belles Gourmandes lunch menu — the kitchen and the room are the same. For parties of 5 or more, call by telephone during business hours rather than using the website, which handles only parties of 2–4.


  • Arrive early and look at the room before you are seated — The nine-metre atrium, the Dalí sculpture, the Lalique candle stand, the Sonia Delaunay tapestries, the Cocteau vase — these are objects that reward attention before the meal begins. The glass willow artwork that greets guests at the entrance, the Rochon-designed Haviland show plate, the Porthault linen in its champagne bubbles pattern: the room is an argument about the relationship between beauty and hospitality that is worth reading before the food begins to make its own argument. Allow fifteen minutes before your reservation time.


  • If it is October through December, come for the white truffle service — Chaignon maintains direct relationships with Alba white truffle suppliers and treats the truffle season at L'Osier with the same seriousness that the restaurant brings to its Japanese ingredient sources at other times of year. The tagliolini with white truffle tableside is one of the most memorable seasonal preparations in Tokyo's fine dining calendar — not because it is unusual (white truffle pasta is common at high-end restaurants globally) but because the quality of the truffle and the precision of the pasta reflect a kitchen working at the highest possible standard with one of the most volatile and expensive seasonal ingredients in the world. 



  • Order the abalone — The Wild Black Abalone Cooked in Its Shell is the restaurant's most essential preparation and the dish that most completely expresses what L'Osier does that no equivalent restaurant can. It is a Limoges plate designed by the chef, carrying an ingredient from Chinese waters, prepared in a shell, finished with Japanese sea urchin and smoked eel and sansho leaves, in a sabayon made from the abalone's own liver. It is French haute cuisine and Japanese seasonal cooking simultaneously, and it is neither, because neither tradition produces this dish on its own. Order it. If it is not on the current menu, ask whether it can be requested.


  • Let the sommelier guide the wine pairing — especially for the Japanese wine selections — L'Osier's sommelier team has assembled a cellar that extends from the canonical French producers (Burgundy, Champagne, Bordeaux, Rhône) into the finest Japanese wine producers — a relatively small but rapidly developing category that L'Osier is in an ideal position to represent, given its simultaneous rootedness in French and Japanese culture. The Japanese wine pairings, in particular, are an experience unavailable at any equivalent three-star French restaurant outside Japan: wines made from Japanese grapes in Nagano, Yamanashi, and Hokkaido, calibrated by a team that has spent years understanding how they work alongside the kitchen's specific preparations.


  • Understand that this restaurant is a specific version of French haute cuisine that exists nowhere else — The French grand maison tradition — Taillevent, where Chaignon trained; Pierre Gagnaire, where he worked in both Paris and Tokyo — is present in everything the kitchen does: the technique, the saucing, the classical structure of the menu, the formal service. But the Japanese context, the Japanese ingredients, the Japanese tableware crafts on the table, and the Shiseido philosophy of beauty as a continuous practice rather than an occasional gesture produce a restaurant that is simultaneously fully French and impossible outside Japan. The Dalí is in the dining room. The Puiforcat silver is used daily. The abalone is cooked in its shell. This combination exists because of a cosmetics company that opened a soda fountain in Ginza in 1902 and decided, over the following century, to keep following that impulse as far as it would go.
Why This Restaurant


What L'Osier actually is


L'Osier is the only restaurant in the world that could have been founded by a cosmetics company and mean it entirely seriously. The argument that beauty and food are expressions of the same impulse — "Beauty Innovations for a Better World" — is, at most companies that say something similar, a marketing alignment. At Shiseido, which has been pursuing beauty as a corporate philosophy since 1872, across every medium it has entered — pharmacy, soda fountain, restaurant, skincare, cosmetics, fine dining — the argument is institutional. The restaurant is its most concentrated form.


The third generation of chefs — Borie, Ménard, Chaignon — inherited a restaurant with a specific and unusual history: not the private project of an ambitious young chef, not the flagship of a hospitality group, not a hotel restaurant, but an expression of a philosophy that predates any of them by decades. Chaignon arrived in 2013 to find a restaurant that had closed for renovation, its three stars suspended, its identity intact. He spent six years rebuilding toward three stars with a team of 44 chefs and a kitchen philosophy that kept everything essential and added only what the Japanese context demanded. The third star returned in 2019. It has not left since. La Liste scored it 98.00 points in both 2024 and 2025. Chaignon received the Chevalier of the French Order of Agricultural Merit in 2024.


The best things always come from history. L'Osier's DNA lasts for much more time than its fifty years. When the history of Shiseido's restaurant business started in 1902, with the soda fountain in the Ginza pharmacy, it was already an expression of the same curiosity, the same conviction that pleasure and beauty and food and culture are not separate things but the same thing seen from different angles.

FROM THE RESTAURANT'S OWN HISTORY OF ITSELF


What the restaurant asks of its guests is attentiveness of the same quality it brings to everything it does. The Puiforcat silver has been maintained for twenty-five years at every service because the quality of a meal is partly the quality of the objects that carry it. The Dalí sculpture is in the dining room because beauty accumulates — because a room that holds a Dalí and a Cocteau and a Delaunay is not the same room without those things, even when you are not looking at them. The abalone is cooked in its shell because the shell is part of the flavour and part of the theatre and part of the argument that this cuisine is inseparable from the specific waters and the specific organisms that Japanese fishing tradition has been tending for centuries.


The willow trees that gave the restaurant its name are gone from Ginza — the city grew around them and they did not survive. What remains is a glass artwork in the entrance that depicts the willow, and a restaurant that has maintained, across fifty years and three generations of chefs and one closure and eight consecutive Michelin three-stars, the conviction that the willow stood for: that Ginza deserves something beautiful, that beauty is worth pursuing at every cost, and that the best French cuisine in the world, in the right hands and the right context, can be made with Japanese precision in a room designed by a Frenchman for a Japanese cosmetics company that has been thinking about this question, continuously, since 1872.