A few streets from Reims Cathedral, the restaurant Racine occupies a world of its own. There are only twelve seats, a kitchen close enough to follow the movements behind the counter, and the feeling, almost immediately, that Kazuyuki Tanaka has reduced the distance between what he imagines and what eventually reaches the table. The scale matters. Nothing here needs to be amplified. The restaurant has been built around proximity: to the chef, to the ingredients, to the wines, champagnes and, gradually, to the memories that have shaped his cooking.
Kazuyiki Tanaka has lived in France for around twenty years, long enough for the usual distinctions between Japanese and French cuisine to become largely irrelevant to what happens at Racine. Japan remains present in the precision of his gestures, in restraint, in the attention given to seasons and in a particular sensitivity to balance. France is present everywhere else: in the produce, in the wines, in Champagne and in the life he has constructed here. Racine belongs somewhere between the two, although even that description feels too simple. What has emerged in Reims is increasingly its own language, one that seems to resemble the chef more closely with every passing year.
That language begins on paper. Throughout dinner, small cards arrive at the table. Tanaka draws them himself and writes the accompanying texts, in French and English, before associating each one with a sequence of the menu. They are not explanations of dishes in the conventional sense. They are fragments of thought. A memory of arriving in France, the changing colour of a season, an ingredient he once misunderstood, the trust placed in a product, a sharpening stone used by his father-in-law. Food enters only afterwards. The cards reveal something essential about Racine: Tanaka does not appear to begin with a recipe. He begins with an image, a sensation, an episode of his life, sometimes even a question.
One of the first is titled The Time of Generations in a Glass. Kazuyuki Tanaka writes about harvest as the culmination of 365 days of work, about vines carrying an inheritance from one generation to another and about wine creating a bridge between past and future. At the bottom of the page appear four words: hamachi, beetroot, blueberry, kiwi. They become the first landscape of the evening. The connection is not explained further. It does not need to be. This is how Racine works: the written thought opens a door, and the plate takes the story somewhere else.
Another card is called The Intercom of the Seasons. Kazuyuki Tanaka describes the trees he sees while running and the way they silently announce the passing of time: leaves appearing, flowers blooming, fruit forming, then falling away. Three small compositions follow – kohlrabi with anchovy and caper; red mullet with a cereal tuile and Oscietra caviar; crab with lavender. The season is not illustrated literally. It is translated. Nature provides the information, as Kazuyuki Tanaka writes, and the chef finds another language in which to pass it on.
That approach gives the restaurant an unusual freedom. Ingredients that appear distant from one another can occupy the same plate because their relationship is not based on convention. Langoustine meets carrot, banana and coconut. Caviar is paired with watermelon. Carabinero appears with radish and quince. Arctic char is associated with fennel, apple and hummus. A list of ingredients could make these combinations appear deliberately provocative. At the table, they feel much more intuitive. Kazuyuki Tanaka works through contrasts, temperature, acidity, sweetness, bitterness and texture, allowing an ingredient to change direction without losing its identity.
The card accompanying the langoustine is titled The Invisible Manual. Kazuyuki Tanaka remembers working with chef Gilles Tournade in Rouen, reproducing gestures without always understanding why they were done that way. Years later, those gestures had become instinctive. He writes about the things nobody formally teaches us, the knowledge transmitted almost invisibly from one person to another. It is a revealing thought for a restaurant where so much appears meticulously composed. Behind the precision sits something far less measurable…
Elsewhere, Trust introduces Ozaki beef and celeriac. Kazuyuki Tanaka writes about ingredients that can be approached almost without fear because years of experience have established a relationship with them. He contrasts this with the uncertainty of confronting something unfamiliar. The idea is simple, yet it says much about the way Racine has evolved. Confidence here does not lead to repetition. It creates the freedom to move further.
Perhaps this is why some of the restaurant’s most luxurious ingredients never feel displayed as trophies. Oscietra caviar, Breton langoustine or Ozaki beef enter the menu without taking control of it. Their prestige is secondary to the place they occupy in Kazuyuki Tanaka’s composition. A plate titled Total Eclipse brings together Oscietra caviar and watermelon. The chef writes about two ingredients meeting perfectly for a brief moment, like the alignment of the sun and moon, before separating again. It is a poetic idea, yet it also captures his way of cooking: ingredients are allowed to meet intensely without being asked to become permanently inseparable.
The visual dimension of Racine extends naturally to the plates. Kazuyuki Tanaka’s drawings provide the first indication of how important shape and space are to him. On the table, colour becomes another vocabulary. A piece of fish, a line of sauce, a flower or a vegetable may occupy very little physical space and still determine the entire composition. This is where photographs of Racine become particularly expressive. They capture something words cannot entirely convey: the delicacy of the construction, but also the moments when that delicacy is interrupted by something much more direct.
Champagne has found its place inside this world without Racine ever becoming a restaurant defined by its geography alone. Our evening begins with the Soléra of Olivier Horiot from Les Riceys, a bottle that immediately sets the tone for a wine selection interested in personalities as much as appellations. Grower Champagnes appear naturally throughout the experience, alongside still wines from other parts of France. The cellar follows the same curiosity as the kitchen. Reims is not simply the address written beneath the restaurant’s name; Champagne forms part of the landscape from which Racine has grown.
That intimacy also makes the story of September 2006 particularly resonant. Kazuyuki Tanaka writes about arriving in France twenty years ago and working at Flocons de Sel in Megève. The first Arctic char he encountered slipped constantly beneath his knife; the cutting board was unfamiliar, his technique still adapting. Years later, he remembers not the difficulty but the taste of that first bite. At Racine, the memory becomes Arctic char with fennel, apple and hummus. A moment of uncertainty from the beginning of his French life has become part of the restaurant he now owns.
Towards the end of dinner, the cards become almost meditations on the passing of the season. The End of Summer, the Beginning of Autumn accompanies raspberry, chocolate and elderflower sorbet. Tanaka writes of flowers disappearing while their scent remains preserved in sugar, meeting the last raspberries of summer. Then comes The Contrast of Melon: melon, yuzu and fir, a final play between fruit, freshness and the memory of the forest. The progression feels less like a menu reaching its obligatory desserts than a story slowly finding its final pages.
Perhaps this is what makes Racine such a compelling reason to come to Reims. Its exclusivity is real – twelve seats inevitably make a reservation precious – yet exclusivity is not its subject. The restaurant is compelling because it offers access to something unusually coherent. The room, the counter, the drawings, the wines, the produce and the food all seem to originate from the same inner landscape.
Kazuyuki Tanaka has spent two decades in France and Racine does not ask him to choose between the country he came from and the country in which he has built his life. It allows both to recede into something more intimate. What remains is a restaurant shaped by the seasons he observes, the people who taught him, the products he trusts, the memories he carries and the imagination with which he continues to connect them.