The scene takes place in Paris one evening in January 2020, under the glass roofs of the Pavillon Gabriel, a few steps from the Champs-Elysées. In front of an audience of chefs, journalists and catering professionals, Kei Kobayashi climbs the stage to receive one of the most prestigious distinctions that can ever honor a cook: being crowned three stars in the Michelin guide for his restaurant, Kei . The Japanese chef, with blond peroxide hair, then grabbed the microphone to pronounce these few words in a moved voice: “I am a foreign chef. I thank you, because you have accepted the Japanese leaders among you, you have accepted our place. Thank you very much, thank you France! »
That day, the native of the prefecture of Nagano, on the island of Honshu, becomes the first Japanese chef to obtain such consecration on French soil. The next day, the Japanese press camped outside the door of his restaurant on rue Coq-Héron (Paris 1er), while in the Archipelago, the announcement of the news is already opening the television news. In the Land of the Rising Sun, where old ties are cultivated with French haute cuisine, the chef’s performance will be celebrated for many weeks… with a pride comparable to that of winning a Nobel Prize or a a soccer world cup.
“I found this outfit so beautiful, so chic, so elegant…so different. It was then that I decided to become a cook, but of French cuisine. » Kei Kobayashi
If Kei Kobayashi, 43 years old at the time, struggles to hide his emotion, it is because this reward, imprinted with a strong symbolism, comes to crown the culmination of a long career of thirty years, entirely put at the service of French gastronomy. The trigger goes back to adolescence, when young Kei watched a cooking show in which Alain Chapel (a famous chef who died in 1990) appeared in a white jacket and a chef’s hat. “I found this outfit so beautiful, so chic, so elegant…so different. It was then that I decided to become a cook, but of French cuisine,” he confides in Kai III, the last work of the sublime trilogy dedicated to him by the author Chihiro Masui published by Flammarion (2022).
A precise and technical kitchen
The rest of his story is a clever mix of encounters, visceral passion and stubbornness. He was only 15 when he convinced his parents, restaurateurs at the head of a izakaya, traditional Japanese bistro, to let him go on an apprenticeship at the Tokyu Harvest Club in Nagano, where he familiarized himself with the basics of French cuisine. A few years later, while assisting chef Tadaaki Shimizu in several of his French-inspired restaurants in Tokyo, the latter encouraged him to complete his training in France.
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