Subterranean sushi - restaurant in Tokyo - Interiors Quarterly

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 1996

Japanese cuisine is complex and varied, and the rituals and protocols surrounding its consumption are an integral part of a uniquely hierarchical culture, in which social and professional status is minutely calibrated. The choice of venue and menu for business lunches and dinners is therefore not something to be taken lightly. Plantec's Miyako restaurant provides a choice: a relatively informal spot for lunch upstairs; and a highly exclusive world of aesthetic pleasure downstairs. The distinction between the two styles of dining is total, yet both offer something of interest, in a quiet side street close to Tokyo's commercial heart.

The ground floor restaurant is entered directly from the pavement, presenting its single dining room with Western style tables and chairs, flanked by booths which wrap around the space, set out along a curve which has become something of a trade mark of Plantec's Tadasu Ohe and many of his compatriots. Although linked to the street by only the single door and a row of five narrow, low-level, vertical slit windows, the dominant theme of the upper restaurant is the outdoors. The room is dominated by a single, raking column, wrapped in rope, from which radiate the slender structural members of a metaphoric umbrella. The ceiling's uniformly diffused lighting successfully represents the notion of daylight, permeating the membrane of a giant parasol. The austerity of the other finishes -- roughcast concrete walls, and a `soiled' floor -- complete the al fresco dining iconography.

The basement restaurant is altogether more complex and lavish. Dining here is strictly by invitation only, the Miyako being one of Tokyo's quasi-club institutions, serving a mainly business clientele, to which gaijin are seldom admitted. The dining experience conveys the intimacy -- and intrinsic exclusivity -- of being a guest in a traditional Japanese home, combined with the more idiosyncratic and mysterious complexities of Tadasu Ohe's urban underworld. An anonymous door from the pavement gives access to what seems little more than a fire escape stair, by which you immediately descend to the first basement. Here shoes are removed, in recognition of the private establishment's threshold. Turning through 180 degrees, you walk along a gallery, overlooking a double height subterranean courtyard -- a space which serves no functional purpose but provides a point of circulatory and iconographic orientation. The elaborate promenade from the street to the basemen dining spaces presents visitors with glimpses of kaleidoscopic, scarcely accessible spaces, containing abstracted fragments derived from traditional Japanese gardens and domestic architecture.

Within a minimalist vocabulary, Ohe has found straightforward devices for representing his underlying theme. The restaurant is understood as a cluster of individual, domestic dining rooms, each one equipped in traditional Japanese fashion, with diners seated on the matted ground surrounding low tables. The four rooms are of varying sizes, ensuring that all parties are given a space maintaining an appropriate degree of intimacy, tailored to their individual needs. Niches within dining rooms, containing top-lit ornamental plants, imply a world of gardens beyond the restaurant's walls. Unconcerned by the economics of Tokyo's legendary land prices, Ohe has allowed the generous courtyard to remain empty of paying clients, representing an idealised world, with a reflective aluminum-tiled ceiling and neon-lit ornamental pond. A solitary plant, standing on a ledge above some of the dining rooms, implies the presence of a wider, more natural landscape above and beyond Miyako's microcosm.