L’Effervescence

I’ll say this should be a pretty good place to bring your business partners or significant others for important occasions. Or romantic dates with people who love wine and modern French dishes. It’s not classic French but rather is something that is in fashion. The dinner course was more filling than it looked and the quality wasn’t bad (I had a glass of wine recommended for each dish of the course), but I wasn’t overly blown away.
This restaurant is more about the total experience, I felt, If you are the kind of person who goes for the quality of food, don’t come here because what you’d pay would be too much for what you get. As you can see in the photos below, it’s absolutely an nice place to be, so if you go for its atmosphere and total experience, there’s no reason I’d stop you.

This was one of my favorite non-​Japanese food experiences in Japan. Excellent, excellent, excellent. In a nutshell, this restaurant provides a world-​class French dining experience with a distinctive Japanese influence (ingredients and, to some extent, style).
I’m lucky to come to Japan periodically for work and always try to «collect» great food experiences here. This is most definitely one of them. More generally, Tokyo has absolutely wonderful non-​Japanese food. The best chefs here are perfectionists — so quality is amazing — but there is also some unique elements and inspirations in their international cuisine (e.g., French and Italian). Uniqueness and creativity aren’t front and center (i.e., the spirit of a cuisine is preserved) but — in places like L’Effervescence — they do enough to make your experience distinct from, say, the best French restaurants in Paris. So don’t just come to Japan to try their best Japanese food!!!
Another thing I specifically love about L’Effervescence: they will accommodate your food restrictions. This is not an issue for me but it was for one of my guests at this dinner. Another REALLY fun fact: they will accommodate by «tweaking» the dishes they give to «constrained dinners» rather than fully substituting dishes. Thus, everyone at the table will get very similar dishes. All «versions» of their dishes work too! This facilitates talking about the food experience in real-​time. This is important since, in my opinion, such experiences are most fulfilling when you and your dining group can discuss ;-)

L’Effervescense is a two Michelin-​star restaurant in the cute area of Omote-​Sando. The ambiance is neat but relaxed and the cuisine Japanese with a French twist. When booking the restaurant, we did not expect to be ordering wine. We had the expectation of the wines being slightly out of our price range as well as the list being more to the direction of big brand bubblies. How wrong we were, on both aspects. When I saw the champagne list of this place, I was blown away. Jacques Selosse, Benoit Lahaye, Léclapart and Vouette & Sobree are only a few names from the list. Prices started from 10 000 yen for a bottle. For the cheaper range it seemed to be double the store price. But for the more expensive ones, they had perhaps added only around 5 000 – 10 000 yen. Perhaps they had a fixed margin. Don’t know. Whatever the case, I do not recall ever seeing such a perfect list of my favorite champagnes ever before. Go and have a look yourself. We almost went for a bottle, but decided against it after realizing it was barely noon. The champagne by the glass was a Lahaye blanc de noirs and cost only around 2000 yen (14 EUR). Service at the restaurant was wonderful and so was the food. One of the best restaurant experiences of my life.

Was pretty special. Went there for the dinner course and had matching wines. Would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in great and interesting gastronomy.

Probably one of the best French style restaurants in Tokyo. We tried many restaurants over the last 5 years, but L’effervescence combines the quality of the ingredients and the research of perfection in the preparation. The chef skillfully uses the French cooking techniques on high quality local ingredients and selected imported products. I thought I had tried every possible ways of eating foie gras, but what we tried 2 days ago at L’effervescence was beyond words.
The service was also perfect. Zac made us drool while explaining how the dishes were prepared and made us believe that we were in the kitchen when they were created.
This is an outstanding restaurant with a very bright future.