Sushi Kaiseki Okuno opens inside Tokyo National Museum

Sushi Kaiseki Okuno opens on 30 September on the ground floor of the Gallery of Horyuji Treasures at the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno, with a single ¥35,000 course and 16 seats.

It is the last of three new dining spaces the museum announced on 5 August. All three are run by Oaks Co., based in Toyama. The other two, THE RESTAURANT Tokyo National Museum, with 94 seats inside and 44 on the terrace, and a Garden Cafe beside it, opened on 28 August. The interiors were designed under the supervision of Rika Yukimasa, a culinary researcher and space designer who also serves as a museum ambassador.

What ¥35,000 buys at Sushi Kaiseki Okuno

Sixteen seats, one course and a building full of seventh-century treasures: the museum has picked its diners.

The format is sushi kaiseki: seasonal kaiseki dishes built on premium ingredients, combined with hand-formed sushi and served as a chef's-choice course. The price is ¥35,000 including tax, according to the museum's release and the trade paper Kanko Keizai Shimbun. Seating is limited to eight places at the counter and a private room for eight. No chef has been named so far.

Lunch runs from 11:00 to 14:00, with last orders at 13:00. Dinner, from 17:00 to 22:00, is by reservation only and falls mostly after the galleries close. The operator says the entry procedure for evening guests, and the rules on museum admission, will be published on its website before opening.

The room was previously the Hotel Okura Garden Terrace. It closed on 7 June together with two other Hotel Okura outlets in the museum, when Hotel Okura Enterprise's contract ended, and food trucks in the front plaza covered the summer. The museum says it wants its restaurants to be part of the visit rather than a pause from it.

A sushi counter in Yoshio Taniguchi's gallery

The Gallery of Horyuji Treasures, designed by Yoshio Taniguchi and opened in 1999, holds more than 300 objects that the Horyuji temple in Nara presented to the Imperial Household in 1878, most of them from the seventh and eighth centuries. Its glass front stands behind a shallow reflecting pool, one of the calmest views on the museum grounds.

The price gap inside the same museum is wide. At THE RESTAURANT, the Tohaku set meal costs ¥3,800; the sushi counter asks more than nine times as much and is aimed at guests who book dinner first and the exhibition second. It joins a busy month of Tokyo openings, after the 68 food tenants of Tofrom Yaesu by Tokyo Station.

The opening date is still marked as provisional on the operator's website. The treasures a few rooms away, some of them more than 1,300 years old, have waited longer.