Lionel Beccat spent five years as sous-chef at La Maison Troisgros — the three-starred house in Roanne that Michel Troisgros inherited from his father Pierre, and that had been one of the foundational institutions of nouvelle cuisine since the 1960s. In those five years, Troisgros trusted him with the kitchen's operational logic and technical standard. When the Tokyo commission arrived, he chose Beccat over chefs with more senior titles. The twenty-four-hour offer — come to Tokyo, run my first restaurant outside France — was not a casual proposition. It was a judgement about who could hold a standard in a city whose culinary culture neither of them knew well. Beccat arrived in 2006, led Cuisine[s] Michel Troisgros Tokyo to two Michelin stars, and in 2012 opened ESqUISSE with the accumulated understanding of six years' immersion in Japanese ingredients, markets, and producers. The restaurant now sources from more than forty producers — approximately half of whom Beccat first met at the weekend farmers' market in front of the United Nations University in Aoyama.

The twenty-four seasonal divisions of the Japanese calendar — koshu, the system inherited from Chinese astronomy that divides the solar year by the celestial longitude of the sun rather than by month — are not a decorative reference at ESqUISSE. They are the naming system for the menu's courses. Each dish is titled after the solar term that governs the moment of its service: Risshun, the beginning of spring; Shōman, the grain fills; Taisho, the great heat. The name is not a description of the dish. It is a placement of the dish in a larger natural sequence — an indication that what is on the plate exists in relationship to where the sun is in its arc, and that this relationship is the primary fact about the ingredient. A halibut aged four days. An amadai steamed to retain its freshness. A duck magret cooked to a caramel skin. Bergamot butter in the sauce. The French technique is precise and confident. The Japanese ingredient is sovereign.

Kazutoshi Narita trained across six countries — with Pierre Hermé in Paris, with Tateru Yoshino, and in the kitchens of Joël Robuchon — before joining ESqUISSE at its opening in 2012. In 2017, he received the Asia's Best Pastry Chef award at the Asia's 50 Best Restaurants ceremony in Bangkok. His desserts at ESqUISSE are not a conclusion to the meal. They are a parallel argument — composed with the same seasonal logic as the savoury courses, executed with a vocabulary of sugar work, soufflé, and textural contrast that is entirely his own. His rice pudding with olive ice cream has become a reference point in Tokyo's fine dining conversation — a dish that uses two of the most familiar ingredients in French and Japanese tradition and finds in their combination something that neither tradition had thought to look for. Since 2016, he also runs ESqUISSE Cinq, a dedicated dessert counter in Ginza, where guests may arrive for the sweet course alone.

Eiji Wakabayashi received the inaugural Sommelier Award of the Michelin Guide Tokyo 2025 — a distinction that acknowledged not merely his technical knowledge but his understanding of wine as a narrative element in the meal's structure. At ESqUISSE, the wine programme is built on the same principle that governs the menu: the pairing is not a complement to the dish but a counterpoint, chosen to reveal something in the food that the food alone does not say. Wakabayashi includes Japanese selections — among them bottles from Kusaka Vineyards — alongside the French canon, on the same grounds that Beccat includes Japanese ingredients alongside French technique: because the combination produces something that neither tradition produces in isolation. The service, led by Maître d' Lionel Lavernhe, moves between the formality of the French dining tradition and the attentiveness of Japanese hospitality without settling into either register entirely — which is precisely the equilibrium that ESqUISSE, in all of its decisions, is trying to hold.

Lionel Beccat photographs. Not as a hobby appended to a culinary identity, but as a parallel practice whose relationship to cooking he has thought through with precision. His position: photography and cooking require the same seven elements — skill, vision, materials, awareness, feeling, passion, and luck. The only structural difference is permanence. A photograph stays. A dish vanishes at the moment of its consumption. Beccat does not call either cooking or photography art. They are craft — and the decision about whether they constitute art belongs to the person who receives them. This is not a modest disclaimer. It is a consistent application of the same philosophy that names the restaurant ESqUISSE: the work proposes, the recipient completes. A chef who understands his cuisine this way does not need to explain what he is doing. He needs only to do it well enough that the explanation is unnecessary.

The ninth floor of the Royal Crystal building in Ginza is not an obvious location for a restaurant of ESqUISSE's register — no street presence, no visible facade, access by elevator from a lobby shared with other tenants. The room holds forty-two seats, with a private space for groups of up to twelve. By day, the light entering through the windows gives the interior a clarity that reads as refreshment; after dark, the same space contracts into an intimacy whose defining material is the Kusumi wall — present at every hour, but visible in a different way depending on the light it receives. The 2019 renovation maintained the essential spatial character while deepening the connection between the interior's materials and the earth's natural textures — the same connection that Beccat maintains between his kitchen's sourcing and the seasonal logic of the Japanese calendar. The restaurant and its room are in agreement about what they are trying to do. That agreement is, in itself, a form of precision.