Why you should experience Cicada Minato in Tokyo, Japan.
Cicada Minato is a captivating Mediterranean restaurant where Minami-Aoyama's cosmopolitan character, Spanish and North African cooking, Yoshinobu Ashihara's architecture and a pool-centered garden carry a restaurant born in Minami-Azabu into an expansive second life.
Set along a lane off Kotto-dori near Aoyama-dori and just steps from Spiral, the restaurant unfolds behind crisscross and breadworks into a secluded compound where greenery gradually separates the dining rooms from Omotesando's surrounding commercial streets. A renovated building designed by Yoshinobu Ashihara anchors the property, opening toward terraces, a pool lounge and a bar wrapped in birch bark brought from Hokkaido. Water, timber, custom tile and deep seating divide the large footprint into smaller settings before the menu carries the development across Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Greece, Lebanon and neighboring Mediterranean traditions. The result is a Minami-Aoyama restaurant where architecture, landscape and cooking give a long-running Tokyo dining institution enough physical breadth to transport an evening far beyond its Omotesando address.
What you should know about Cicada Minato.
Cicada Minato is best known for beginning in Minami-Azabu on September 24, 2003 under restaurateur Shinpei Terada and chef David Chiddo before moving to its present Minami-Aoyama home in 2012. Chiddo, a New York-born chef whose career included work in Los Angeles and France, had joined Terada's T.Y. Express operation after arriving in Japan and developed Cicada around “Mediterranean-inspired food & wine,” drawing particularly strongly from the western Mediterranean. The original restaurant became Terada's first urban opening away from the company's Tennoz base, and its decade in Minami-Azabu produced both a loyal clientele and staff who later assumed larger roles across the company. Relocation transformed the scale of the project: the 2012 Minami-Aoyama restaurant occupied 860 square meters inside a renovated building by Yoshinobu Ashihara, with spatial design by bazik extending through dining rooms, terraces, a pool and second-floor private space. The wider property opened with crisscross and an Aoyama branch of breadworks, joining three Tyson operations around the same garden approach. Cicada reopened at the new address on October 23, 2012, nearly ten years after Terada, Chiddo and their partners had launched the original. The move preserved dishes already associated with Minami-Azabu, including chicken tagine with preserved lemon and olives, while giving the restaurant a setting large enough to turn the Mediterranean premise into architecture as well as cooking.
The meal develops most naturally through shared plates, beginning with hummus and grilled flatbread before Iberico ham, calamari, halloumi and other smaller dishes widen the table across the Mediterranean basin. Chicken tagine carries preserved lemon and olives into slow-cooked poultry, using concentrated citrus and briny fruit to cut through the richness of the braise. Portuguese-style chicken moves toward open-fire flavor, and paella shifts the center of the table toward saffron, rice and seafood in a format built for several diners. Moroccan spices and Middle Eastern mezze sit comfortably beside Spanish charcuterie and Italian influences, giving successive courses enough geographical range to change direction. Wine receives equal attention through a list built to travel with those cuisines, making the progression from dips and cured meat through grilled seafood, tagine and rice as much about changing bottles and glasses as changing plates. Cicada turns breadth into the pleasure of dinner, allowing several coastal cooking traditions to accumulate gradually across one table.
How to fold Cicada Minato into your trip.
Cicada Minato works as the dinner destination within a Minami-Aoyama route connecting postwar Japanese architecture, Taro Okamoto's creative life and the pre-modern Asian collection assembled by industrialist Kaichiro Nezu.
Begin at Spiral, completed in 1985 from a design by Fumihiko Maki, whose cultural complex draws gallery, performance, retail and dining spaces through a building created for Wacoal. Continue to Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum, occupying the former home and studio where Okamoto worked from the 1950s until his death in 1996, with the building itself designed by Junzo Sakakura. Conclude at Nezu Museum, founded from Kaichiro Nezu's collection and opened at his former Aoyama residence in 1941 before Kengo Kuma designed the present museum completed in 2009. Cicada Minato closes the progression nearby with another architectural chapter, placing dinner inside a Yoshinobu Ashihara building whose 2012 conversion gave Terada and Chiddo's decade-old Mediterranean restaurant a substantially larger Tokyo home.
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