odo

Fourteen people eat at a time, along a black stone counter in a room Shinichiro Ogata designed with his Tokyo studio SIMPLICITY, the concrete floors worked with straw so the surface keeps a roughness underfoot. Odo calls him his master of aesthetics.

Odo opened here in 2018, after Kyoto Wakuden, a kaiseki house running since 1870, then Yakumo Saryo in Tokyo, then New York from 2012 and the kitchen at Kajitsu, where his subject was shojin ryori, the plant based cooking he introduced to the United States. Japan's agriculture ministry named him a goodwill ambassador for its cuisine in 2024, and since May the restaurant has kept a residency at OGATA Paris, in a 17th century mansion in the Marais, that runs to December. One shojin course still sits inside every menu here.

Lunch is six courses at noon and at 1:45, dinner eight or nine at six and at 8:30, the produce out of New York State and Japan, the sequence running sakizuke through the warm soup to a rice course at the end. The work happens in view: an etched metal bowl lifted with pliers, seaweed portioned by chopstick into bowls glazed gold, a short brush moving yuzu zest onto the plate. Nothing is hurried.