Why you should experience Chez Inno in Tokyo, Japan.
Chez Inno is a distinguished French restaurant where Kyobashi's cultivated character, Noboru Inoue's formative years in Paris, classical sauce work and Junji Koga's four-decade tenure preserve one of the foundational kitchens of modern French dining in Japan.
Set along Chuo-dori near Kajibashi-dori and just steps from Meidi-Ya Kyobashi Store, the restaurant occupies the first floor of Meiji Kyobashi Building behind a formal entrance that separates dinner from the surrounding commercial streets within moments. Chandeliers, dark timber and stained glass frame white-clothed tables, giving the dining room the scale and ceremony associated with a traditional grande maison. The kitchen retains an unusually deep commitment to sauce, using stocks, wine and reductions across preparations whose lineage reaches back through Inoue's work at Ginza L'Ecrin and Paris. The result is a Kyobashi dining room where classical French technique has remained alive through direct transmission between chefs across more than four decades.
What you should know about Chez Inno.
Chez Inno is best known for the French culinary lineage established when Noboru Inoue opened the restaurant in Kyobashi in March 1984 after working in Europe and serving as chef at Ginza L'Ecrin. Junji Koga, born in Saga Prefecture in 1964, joined during the opening year and built his complete professional career at Chez Inno, rising to executive chef in 2006 and receiving the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare's Contemporary Master Craftsman honor in 2016. The restaurant moved from Kyobashi 3-chome in December 2004 after redevelopment displaced the original premises, finding its new home in Meiji Kyobashi Building through a relationship with Meiji leadership. Inoue died in 2021, leaving Koga to carry forward a working relationship that had stretched across three decades. Another succession arrived in 2022 when Junya Tejima became head chef after earlier work at Casserole in Kofu, training under Ken Yoshino at Stella Maris in France and leadership positions at Tateru Yoshino and Hotel de Yoshino. Chez Inno's influence extends into commercial food development through a relationship with House Foods Group reaching back 35 years to Inoue's tenure, with Koga contributing technical expertise for 25 years. Tabelog awarded Chez Inno Gold in 2025 and Silver in 2026, alongside selection for its French Tokyo Top 100 in 2021, 2023 and 2025.
Lamb baked in pastry “Maria Callas” style provides the essential encounter with Inoue's cooking, a dish he devised around 1974 during his Ginza L'Ecrin period after his earlier work at Maxim's in Paris. Lamb loin encloses foie gras, black truffle and mushroom duxelles before pastry surrounds the assembly, requiring the meat to remain pink as the foie gras warms and the exterior reaches crispness. Périgueux sauce draws Cognac, Madeira, Port and truffle into the finished plate, with Koga refining the sauce after becoming its principal custodian at age 25 and later removing cornstarch to give the finish greater clarity. Lobster and vegetable gâteau “Côte d'Or” style shifts toward shellfish, vegetables, tomato and truffle dressings and sea-urchin sauce, with king crab and caviar extending the composition. Sole braised with Albert sauce, sole mousse with Royale sauce and consommé preserve further branches of the classical repertoire, and a cellar holding 10,000 bottles concentrates heavily on France alongside selections from California and Japan. Chez Inno makes sauce the organizing principle of the meal, connecting Inoue's signature lamb with the technique Koga and Tejima continue to practice in Kyobashi.
How to fold Chez Inno into your trip.
Chez Inno works as the dinner destination within a Kyobashi route connecting a postwar private art collection, Japan's national film archive and the commercial architecture that accompanied the district into the twentieth century.
Begin at Artizon Museum, descended from the Bridgestone Museum of Art that tire industrialist Shojiro Ishibashi opened on January 8, 1952 on the second floor of his Kyobashi headquarters. Ishibashi began collecting seriously after painter Hanjiro Sakamoto urged him to preserve works by Shigeru Aoki; the collection subsequently expanded through Takeji Fujishima and European art, passed to the Ishibashi Foundation and exceeded five million cumulative museum admissions by 1996. The predecessor closed in 2015 before Artizon opened in Museum Tower Kyobashi in January 2020 with galleries across three floors and twice the former exhibition area. Continue to National Film Archive of Japan, whose lineage began in 1952 as the film library of the newly established National Museum of Modern Art inside the former Nikkatsu headquarters in Kyobashi. The film division became the National Film Center in 1970, gained Yoshinobu Ashihara-designed facilities through the 1986 Sagamihara Conservation Center and rebuilt 1995 Kyobashi building, then became an independent national institution in 2018; its collection surpassed 90,000 films by March 2025. Conclude at Meidi-Ya Kyobashi Store, tying the route back toward Chuo-dori and the commercial district immediately surrounding dinner, where Meidi-Ya's longstanding association with imported foods places another strand of Japan's engagement with Western dining culture into the neighborhood. Chez Inno closes the progression several blocks away with the culinary counterpart: a restaurant founded in 1984 by a chef whose European training helped carry the techniques of French grande cuisine into Tokyo and whose kitchen passed directly to Koga's generation.
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