Why you should experience Lature in Tokyo, Japan.
Lature is an accomplished French restaurant where Aoyama's culinary sophistication, Japanese seasonality, classical technique and Takuto Murota's intimate command of wild game converge through cooking rooted directly in the natural world.
Set along Aoyama-dori near Kotto-dori and just steps from Aoyama Gakuin University, the basement restaurant withdraws from the avenue into a restrained dining room whose timber surfaces, branches and earthen tones reference the forests central to Murota's cooking. Counter seats place diners close to the kitchen, giving the preparation of game, seasonal fish and vegetables an immediate presence across the meal. Murota personally hunts and ages wild game, allowing habitat, diet and condition to influence how individual animals are handled once they reach the kitchen. The result is a deeply authored Aoyama restaurant where proximity to the chef and exacting treatment of Japanese ingredients turn French technique into a direct encounter with the landscapes supplying the table.
What you should know about Lature.
Lature is best known for chef-owner Takuto Murota's transformation of hunting into the foundation of a MICHELIN-starred French restaurant, opened independently in 2016 after he developed his approach to game during six years leading the kitchen at deco. Born in Chiba Prefecture in 1982, Murota graduated from Musashino Culinary Institute and trained at Restaurant Tateru Yoshino before becoming chef of deco in 2010, where he acquired a hunting license and earned a MICHELIN Bib Gourmand. Lature followed in 2016, and only one year and three months after opening, the restaurant earned its first MICHELIN star in the 2018 Tokyo guide. Murota expanded the project beyond the dining room in 2020 through Lature Farm in Chiba, growing organic vegetables and incorporating misshapen produce that conventional distribution channels reject. His work with wild food extends from animals he hunts personally to game supplied by trusted hunters, with aging and preparation changing according to an animal's habitat and diet; ducks feeding around rice fields, mountains and coastal areas can produce markedly different meat. Murota became chairman of the Boso Gibier judging panel in 2022, and his environmental work also includes Chefs for the Blue and recurring food-education classes for children. MICHELIN Guide Tokyo 2026 awarded Lature one star for the ninth consecutive year and a Green Star for the fourth consecutive year, extending a run that has made Murota's treatment of Japanese game one of the restaurant's defining achievements.
Venison-blood macaron introduces Murota's game cooking in miniature, turning a part of the animal easily lost during butchery into a delicate shell whose savory filling concentrates the character of Yezo sika deer. Hare Γ la royale pushes the same principle through a far longer process: aging and preparation require more than a month, developing the animal into one of the kitchen's most labor-intensive seasonal specialties. Cuts of deer and boar move onto the grill as bones and offal pass into sauces, letting roasted meat and concentrated reductions emerge from different parts of the same animal with little edible flesh discarded. Wild vegetables and seasonal fish broaden that progression through ingredients gathered from producers across Japan, bringing bitterness, freshness and aquatic richness against the deeper flavors of aged game. Lature makes Murota's complete handling of the ingredient the governing pleasure of dinner, carrying the animal through hunting, aging, butchery, fire and sauce until the finished plate reveals the precision behind his unusually personal form of French cooking.
How to fold Lature into your trip.
Lature works as the dining culmination of an Aoyama route connecting postwar architecture, Japanese contemporary art and the fashion buildings that have made the district an international design center.
Begin at Spiral, opened in 1985 in a Fumihiko Maki building commissioned by Wacoal, where galleries, performance spaces, retail and design occupy an architectural sequence organized around the complex's namesake ramp. Continue to Nezu Museum, founded from industrialist Nezu KaichirΕ's collection and reopened in 2009 through Kengo Kuma's long-roofed museum building, bringing Japanese and East Asian art into direct contact with the former Nezu family garden. Conclude at Prada Aoyama, completed by Herzog & de Meuron in 2003 as a crystalline structure wrapped in diamond-shaped glazing, making the building itself inseparable from the fashion house's presence in Tokyo. Lature completes the progression through another exacting creative practice, placing Murota's hunting, farming and French technique inside the Aoyama streets shaped by architecture, art and specialized craft.
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