[Tokyo] TIRPSE - Diners Club 50 Best Discovery Series

April 05, 2017

[Tokyo] TIRPSE - Diners Club 50 Best Discovery Series

Rating: ❤❤❤

TIRPSE, which is "esprit" spelled backwards, first gained fame as the fastest restaurant to be awarded a Michelin star within two months of opening. The original chef (ex-Quintessence) had since left to work at Den and now Chef Koji Tamura is at the helm. The restaurant had recently been featured on the Diners Club 50 Best Discovery Series (just like one of my favorite restaurant VEA in HK) so I decided to go check it out for lunch recently. For ¥6000, you do get a number of dishes but the portions were on the small side so we left not feeling quite full as opposed to Le Sputnik - another relatively new French restaurant we had tried earlier. The food was also not as impressive - right from the start, we felt that the seasoning of the dishes were rather heavy-handed so we had to ask them to scale back on the salt. After our feedback, the improvement was noticeable and much better but overall there are just better choices for French-Japanese cuisine in Tokyo such as L'Effervescence, Florilege or Esquisse.