The Chef's Table: How Kitchen Counter Dining Became Fine Dining's Best Seat

^{HOW THE SUSHI STALL, THE KAPPO COUNTER AND THE OPEN KITCHEN MOVED THE BEST SEAT IN THE RESTAURANT TO THE STOVE}

A chef's table seats guests inside a working kitchen or directly in front of one, so the chef cooks, and often serves, within arm's reach. The meal is usually a tasting or surprise menu set by the kitchen rather than chosen from a card. The format now ranges from a single table beside the pass to whole restaurants built around a counter, among them Chef's Table at Brooklyn Fare in New York, which became the only restaurant in Brooklyn with three MICHELIN stars, and Kitchen Table in London, which holds two. Its history has two strands. One is Japanese: the sushi stalls of Edo, the kappo counters of Osaka and the omakase meal, each of which put the cook in front of the customer. The other is Western: the kitchen table kept for a chef's friends and regulars, the open kitchen that moved cooking into the dining room, and the counter restaurants that followed L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon in 2003.

^{WHAT IS A CHEF'S TABLE? FROM THE KITCHEN CORNER TO A BOOKABLE SEAT}

The MICHELIN Guide traces the chef's table to chefs who fed family and friends in the kitchen while they worked, seating them at a small table in a quiet corner or, where space was short, at the pass. Restaurateurs then began inviting regular customers to dine behind the scenes. What began as an invitation-only privilege for regulars became a table that any guest could book. Diners there typically had more personal contact with the head chef than guests in the main dining room, and were often served a multi-course meal prepared by the head chef.

The format now takes several forms, and Hong Kong shows most of them. Gaddi's, the French restaurant at The Peninsula Hong Kong, introduced the chef's table to the city in 2000. Its table faces the pass inside an otherwise closed kitchen, separated from the cooks only by the pass and a work corridor, and head chef Xavier Boyer rejected a glass divider because the table had to stay part of the kitchen. About half of its bookings come from regulars. The Krug Room at Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong is a private room reached through The Chinnery, with windows onto the events kitchen, where the chefs present each course and discuss the champagne pairings.

The third form is the counter. At VEA, led by chef Vicky Cheng, about 80 per cent of guests sit at a counter along the open kitchen, with three tables and a private room that looks onto the hot station. Because guests see and hear the whole service, the kitchen uses induction cooktops and has no ticket system calling orders to the pass. Okra Hong Kong runs two versions of the idea: a ground-floor izakaya with counter seats facing the chefs, open to walk-in guests ordering from the regular menu, and an upstairs bar serving only omakase by prepaid reservation.

^{THE SUSHI STALLS OF EDO}

The direct exchange between cook and customer was built into nigirizushi from the start. According to an article published by Nippon.com, the writer Kitagawa Morisada recorded that early nineteenth-century Edo, the city now called Tokyo, replaced pressed hakozushi with nigiri shaped by hand. Hanaya Yohei, credited with inventing nigirizushi around 200 years ago, first sold vinegar-cured kohada carried in wooden boxes through the city's streets at night, then ran a yatai, a street stall. Customers ate standing at the stall, served directly by the cook.

Kitagawa Utamaro's 1786 picture book Ehon Edo suzume shows sushi stalls in Ryōgoku and Asakusa, where customers chose from the toppings on display and the chef behind them made each piece. A piece cost 8 mon and tamagoyaki 16 mon, eggs being a luxury. After dark, stalls selling sushi and tempura were common in Edo's crowded neighbourhoods, where the shortage of land made stalls a popular option. In 1824 Hanaya Yohei found his stall too confining and opened a full shop in Ryōgoku. The Nippon.com article describes these stalls as an early form of fast food.

^{KAPPO, OMAKASE AND THE JAPANESE COUNTER}

Kappo applied the same principle to cooked Japanese cuisine. According to the Osaka Convention and Tourism Bureau, the style is said to have originated in Osaka, and it was in the middle of the Taisho period that it came to represent a style of Japanese cuisine. The name joins two characters: katsu, meaning to cut, and po, meaning to cook. Counter seats are arranged around the chef standing at the cutting board, and customers can order what they want on the spot and have it cooked in front of them. Kappo restaurants now operate across Japan and overseas.

Omakase removed the menu altogether. The word translates as "I leave it up to you", and the MICHELIN Guide cites the writer Trevor Corson's observation that sushi bars in Japan traditionally had no menus. Where kaiseki follows a ritualised sequence, omakase changes from one occasion to the next, with the chef deciding what to serve as the meal progresses. Nobu Yamazaki of Sushi Taro in Washington, D.C. starts with a few appetisers to gauge a guest's reaction and introduces more adventurous dishes if the guest seems open to them. Sushi Taro's omakase counter seats six diners a night, with two chefs cooking.

Tatsuya Sekiguchi of Omakase Room by Tatsu in New York takes the opposite approach: one frequently changing set menu of 18 pieces of sushi, with extra pieces available à la carte, which he says suits his Edomae style and keeps prices lower. He is the only chef and serves 8 to 10 guests a night across three seatings. The MICHELIN Guide notes that a menuless meal can make diners wary of the bill, and that some chefs set a base price so the cost is known in advance, then offer additional courses for a supplement.

^{HOW THE OPEN KITCHEN CHANGED WESTERN DINING ROOMS}

In the West, an early step was to bring the kitchen into the dining room. In a review of Wolfgang Puck's Spago in Los Angeles, written about three months after the restaurant opened and reprinted by Los Angeles magazine in 2014, the critic Bruce David Colen described a team of chefs working beside Puck in the dining room's open kitchen, and judged them better organised than some of the waiters. He identified the large brick oven, where the pizzas and calzones at the centre of the menu were baked, as the focal point of the restaurant.

Joël Robuchon took the counter itself into French cooking. According to the Associated Press, in 2003 he came out of retirement to create L'Atelier, opening restaurants in Paris and Tokyo almost simultaneously. They were small, intimate restaurants in which diners sat at a counter surrounding the kitchen, and Ateliers later opened in cities across Asia, Europe and the United States. Japan had been a source of inspiration for Robuchon for decades, and Robin Zavou, executive chef of The Krug Room in Hong Kong, has pointed to L'Atelier, where guests sit at the bar counter, as the direction the chef's table is taking, with everyone seated around the chefs' counter. Through the Ateliers and his other restaurants he reached a record 32 MICHELIN stars in 2016.

^{CHEF'S TABLE RESTAURANTS WITH MICHELIN STARS}

Chef's Table at Brooklyn Fare showed that a counter in front of the kitchen could be an entire restaurant. It began as a stainless-steel chef's counter at the back of a grocery store in Downtown Brooklyn, where Cesar Ramirez cooked for the guests in front of him. Time Out New York called the grocery an oddball setting for Ramirez's cooking, and the counter became the only restaurant in Brooklyn with three MICHELIN stars. The restaurant now operates at 431 West 37th Street in Manhattan, where the MICHELIN Guide describes most guests seated at a walnut counter that wraps around a brigade of cooks with nowhere to hide. It holds two stars in the 2025 MICHELIN Guide USA.

Kitchen Table in London, opened by chef James Knappett in 2012, follows the same model. Guests sit at a horseshoe-shaped counter and watch Knappett and his team prepare, serve and talk them through that evening's tasting menu. The evening starts in the Kitchen Table Lounge before guests move to the counter, and the drinks list includes a wine pairing at £175 and a grower Champagne pairing at £250. When the MICHELIN Guide Great Britain and Ireland 2019 was announced on 1 October 2018, Kitchen Table at Bubbledogs, in Bloomsbury, gained its second star, alongside Moor Hall in Aughton.

^{THE CHEF'S TABLE AT OPUS, MANDARIN ORIENTAL SHENZHEN}

Opus is a restaurant at Mandarin Oriental Shenzhen, designed by Silverfox Studios and completed in 2022. The main dining room is defined by geometric metal and lattice screens, red leather banquettes, blue chairs, brass panelling and globe pendants. The chef's table is a counter set beneath a stainless steel kitchen hood, so the cooking equipment that is usually kept out of sight forms part of the interior.

The counter is framed by glass wine cabinets and brass panelling, the same material used in the main dining room alongside its lattice screens and globe pendants, and it looks out over the city.

SOURCES

1. MICHELIN Guide Evolution Of The Chef's Table in Hong Kong
2. Nippon.com When Sushi Became a New Fast Food in Edo
3. Osaka Convention and Tourism Bureau Kappo cuisine
4. MICHELIN Guide Kitchen Language: What Is Omakase?
5. Los Angeles Magazine Flashback Friday: A New Little Spot Called Spago
6. Associated Press, via Chicago Sun-Times Michelin-starred French master chef Joel Robuchon dies at 73
7. MICHELIN Guide Chef's Table at Brooklyn Fare
8. Time Out New York Brooklyn Fare
9. Kitchen Table Kitchen Table London
10. MICHELIN Guide MICHELIN Guide Great Britain and Ireland 2019 results