There are restaurants you admire, restaurants you frequent, and restaurants that quietly attach themselves to your personal history. Shiori belongs firmly in the latter category for me. Exactly nine years ago I wrote my first review on Shiori, just a year after the restaurant first opened its doors. During this decade, countless restaurants have stagnated, become obsolete or simply closed their doors forever. Shiori has done precisely the opposite; it has evolved with such quiet conviction that, when we recently set out to name the best Japanese restaurants in Berlin, it was easy to call it the most profound and singular of them all.

Chef Shiori Arai and his Korean wife Flora opened Shiori in 2016, and from the very start it was clear that this was never going to be just any Japanese restaurant. This was a counter seat omakase, chef’s choice, which is Japanese for “stop fiddling with the menu and just trust the chef" and is the preferred way of serving food by the very top echelon of chefs in Japan.

And yet, while visiting Shiori during the early years, I couldn't help but to leave woith the nagging sense that Arai was driving his Ferrari in second gear. Like many Japanese chefs in Berlin, he seemed spooked by the Teutonic terror of pricing and value for money. So the menu hovered at €70, which even by the measure of those years was absurdly reasonable for a 10+ course tasting menu, and with that came a ceiling. You can’t source the sea’s aristocracy on a budget and you can’t build a brigade when it’s just you and your spouse working until midnight.

Then came Covid, that great gastronomic cull, and something rather special happened. While others were flogging sourdough and slinging DIY taco kits, Shiori & Flora chose to produce chirashi sushi boxes that could have been exhibited at an art exhibition. Wooden crates of jewelled and delicate seafood on perfectly seasoned rice, wrapped in cloths hand-dyed by Flora herself. You didn’t just eat these stunning Chirashi kits; you unwrapped them like smuggled contraband. Opening one felt illicit, ceremonial, hopeful and they remains to this day one of the most profound food memories of Berlin’s lockdown years. They were also further proof that beneath the restraint lay a chef aching to show us everything.

And now, half a decade later, he is doing exactly that.

The post pandemic Shiori is not an evolution, it’s a liberation. A renovated space, more seats, a team in place, and a clear devotion to Kaiseki, the haute liturgy of Japanese dining, where hyper seasonality and produce worship are taken to the ultimate level. And also something Chef Arai is more than familiar with, as his father once operated a Kaiseki restaurant in Fukui, Japan.

The omakase menu at Shiro is now €150 and, more than ever, worth every cent.

Fourteen courses unfold with the quiet confidence of a theatrical performance. A monkfish liver tofu arrives like savoury custard from another dimension, silken and faintly indecent. A seasonal soup that tastes of forests and tide. Then a futomaki roll layered with a small mountain of bluefin tuna belly so lush it dissolves mid chew.

Charcoal grilled king salmon with onion and cabbage proves that restraint can be as thrilling as excess. The sashimi selection, hamachi, tuna, salmon, abalone, shows what happens when Arai is given the means to source properly. A single serving of sukiyaki follows, paper thin slices wagyu kissed by open flame, dipped into egg yolk, pricked with sansho pepper.

I can recommend many fine Japanese restaurants in this city, the Berlin scene has grown up and is today pretty much on par with Düsseldorf, who used to be the ruling destination for top Japanese food in germany. But if you press me, if you demand the single address that delivers the most complete, emotionally resonant, technically ambitious Japanese dining experience in town, there is no hesitation.

It’s Shiori.

And if the pricing proves to be prohibitive for you, check out their Sunday brunch offering where 70EUR will get you breakfast experience close to something you can experience at a high end hotel in Japan.