Korean cuisine × ○○, Endlessly creating new styles
Masahiko Arai, owner and chef of Hoba
“Korean Restaurant Hoba” is a restaurant that has been in the spotlight since becoming the first Korean cuisine restaurant to obtain a Michelin star in 2012.
Based around seasonal vegetable dishes and seafood dishes by Masahiko Arai, including Namul made using Western vegetables like watercress, the restaurant created a sensation by serving healthy and nourishing food. Even before it was listed in the Michelin guide, it was all the hype among foodies as a “restaurant where it’s extremely difficult to get a table”.
In July 2015, Hoba relocated from Tenjinbashi to a new place on the 2nd floor of the Shin Daibiru Building in Dojima. It stands side by side with Edo-style sushi restaurant “Kurosugi Sushi”, another Michelin-starred restaurant. Customers coming from other cities like Kobe and Kyoto are already on the rise in this new location with a wide window opening to lush greeneries.
In October 2015, Hoba achieved the feat of obtaining a second Michelin star. Together with the relocation, Chef Arai has figuratively stepped onto a new stage. Chef Arai has, surprisingly, a background in Italian cuisine, but according to him, there are many similarities between Korean and Italian cooking.
I sat down with this unique chef and interviewed him about the trajectory of his career and his thoughts on starting a restaurant.
Family circumstances and the TV show “Iron Chef” led him to the road of cuisine
Now, Hoba has an established reputation as the first Michelin-starred Korean cuisine restaurant, but let’s go back to the beginning. How did you enter the world of cooking?
Chef Arai:
Initially, I had some vague plans to go to college, but at the time of my high school graduation, I was suddenly expected to work due to family circumstances. Because it was so sudden, I found work at a factory manufacturing plastic molds at East Osaka through a relative. Three years later when my mother remarried, I became happily free again. Maybe it resulted from working in silence with precision machinery for such a long time, but I decided to work at a job that involves communicating with people.
The TV show “Iron Chef” was popular during that time. My mother ran a Korean restaurant, and as a child I would help her buy ingredients, so the restaurant business was something that I was already familiar with. At that time, desserts like tiramisu and panna cotta were all the rage and it was a time where the notion of Italian cuisine was transitioning from “Italian food = Spaghetti” to “Italian food = Chic”. My relative had also brought me to a restaurant where I tried Italian ham and melon. When I ate it I was like “Oh wow, I didn’t know Italian food was this delicious!” so I decided to start learning Italian cooking. From that moment, I was already thinking of running my own restaurant.
