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Japanese Wild Game Becomes French Fine Dining at Shibuya’s Lature

Update-Date: May 11, 2026

Author: Sydney Seekford

Categories: French Wine

Japanese Wild Game Becomes French Fine Dining at Shibuya’s Lature

Hunter and Chef Takuto Murota approaches wild game with the passion of a man setting out to change the world. With his menu of gibier-focused signature dishes and seasonal ingredients, Chef Murota is building the future of sustainable dining one pâté en croûte at a time.

Sydney Seekford

Gourmet Creator

American living in Japan since 2022. Food writer and gourmet content creator for Japan’s most well known food media. Founder of menu translation and language support service MENUWIZ. Work history includes copywriting for booking platforms, video and media production and appearances, and consulting in F&B for household brands. Passionate about regional revitalization and slow tourism with a focus on local food culture.

Intro

Lature (pronounced La-chu-ray) is a Michelin-starred French restaurant in between Shibuya and Omotesando, Tokyo. Its name is derived from the french words, “La nature” and “L’arme” both of which are deeply tied to nature and its bounty and reflect the concept of the restaurant.The menu focuses on wild game and sustainable sourcing, with signature dishes featuring domestic gibier Chef Murota hunts himself. Each course encourages diners to eat adventurously and appreciate the natural bounty of Japan through the lens of pies, patés and pét-nat.

LATURE

Open: Lunch 11:30 am - 3:30 pm, Last Entry 1:30 pm / Dinner 6:00 pm - 11:00 pm, Last Entry 8:00 pm
Closed: Irregular
Average price: [Dinner] 20,000 JPY / [Lunch] 7,000 JPY
Access: 6-minute walk from Exit B1 of Omote-sando Station (Tokyo Metro Hanzomon, Ginza, and Chiyoda Lines), 7-minute walk from the Hikarie Exit of JR Shibuya Station
Address: B1F, Aoyama Luke Bldg., 2-2-2, Shibuya, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo Map
More Details Reservation

About Lature

Lature is split across two floors of a building just far enough from the busy Aoyama-dori to feel like a hidden gem. However, it’s well known to locals for being busy, night after night. Inside, the atmosphere is friendly and warm, facilitated by wholesome French cooking. Both floors feature sculptures of wildlife and dried flowers to set the mood.

At one table, a young American couple beams about the quality of the desserts. At another, a group of four French-speakers (with a bottle of wine open each) are engaged in a lively conversation. Out of sight, Cantonese chattering occasionally cuts through the lulls. Although these guests might not know it, they are all taking part in Chef Murota’s mission to highlight Japanese gibier for a more sustainable future.

Wild game can’t be easily shipped out or replicated overseas, unlike Japan-quality fish, which is routinely shuttled from Toyosu to major counters in New York and Los Angeles. The taste of terroir found in a bite of Ezo deer or wild Japanese boar isn’t exported. Gibier’s exclusivity gives visitors reason to include Chef Murota’s French cooking in itineraries of sushi and tempura. As both chef and advocate, he buys in wholeheartedly, crafting once in a lifetime meals for global diners.

In head chef Takuto Murota’s efforts to make Japan’s gibier more widely known, Lature actively welcomes diners of all backgrounds. His philosophy isn’t about catering to tourists – plenty of local diners also love Lature – but about showing the world a long-lasting part of Japan’s culinary landscape it often overlooks. There was a time when game hunting was an essential part of pre-modern Japan and humans lived in harmony with the wilderness. Chef Murota believes chefs like himself are the key to returning to a more harmonious relationship between man and nature – starting with what’s on the plate.

Chef Murota and the Birth of Lature

Chef Murota. Photo courtesy of Lature

Chef Murota acquired his hunting license in 2009. To supply Lature’s necessary share of wild protein, he hunts around his native Chiba prefecture and beyond about once a week, relying on trusted hunters to bring in domestic duck, deer, and boar when he’s unable to go out himself. Lature goes through about 5kg of game meat on a busy day, with volume and variety depending on the season. Outside of game, the menu also features domestic seafood such as yellowtail, scallops, and seaweed.

In an interview with Japanese journalist Mayuko Yamaguchi, Chef Murota explains that it was a taste of rustic French cooking that inspired him to become a chef in the first place. In middle school, he was moved by the classic French pork-blood sausage, boudin noir. Some of that memory is surely reflected in Lature’s signature blood macaron, a buttery smooth ganache of deer’s blood and spices sandwiched between two perfect rounds of almond cookie.

Sustainable Meat for the Future

Many guests are surely taken aback when their first bite of the meal is introduced as animal blood. However, as soon as you try it, diners find that the silky cream melts away beautifully: Though the dish contains no cocoa powder at all, it is complex with cacao and spice notes, like a deep red wine or intense chocolate cake. The gentle crunch and cushion of the macaron add just enough contrast for a magical first impression. By the time they swallow, many diners’ misgivings about game’s potential have also melted away.

This mind-bending experience is one of the secrets behind Chef Murota’s cooking. By creating genuinely delicious food that both Japanese and international diners can enjoy without pretense, Chef Murota believes that culinary professionals like himself can solve some of the problems society deals with every day. Introducing game as a staple instead of a novelty, he believes, may be the key, though many countries don’t have a food tradition of eating wild game or even enjoying farmed meat nose-to-tail. Some cultures, like Japan, have been turned off of hunting and game meat only in recent decades.

Photo courtesy of Lature

In the past, matagi hunters and satoyama husbandry were essential parts of Japanese life. Now, problems of habitat loss and overpopulation of deer and boar are closely linked to human mishandling of the environment. Chef Murota reports that ninety-percent of wild game is simply disposed of as nuisance animals for upsetting human settlements.

The chef acknowledges that game like ducks and deer that live in human-polluted areas or are handled improperly, even when deemed fit to be used as meat, aren’t at a quality that would encourage the average diner to fully embrace gibier. This realization is part of what encouraged him to seek a deeper understanding of animal terroir and game itself.

By using meat he manages himself from source to sauce, Chef Murota challenges preconceived notions around wild game, developing dishes that overturn stereotypes. The protein served at Lature isn’t gamey or tough, but has nuanced flavor from the animal’s natural diet. Each course would be as delicious prepared with familiar beef or pork, but still underscores the unique appeal of wild meat. The success of Lature in making game palatable rather than polarizing attests to the quality of both Japan’s raw ingredients and the skill of Lature’s kitchen team.

The course makes heavy use of ingredients from Japan’s most well-established production regions, including a farm in Chiba contracted by Lature. Each year, staff take time to work the farm, forging an even closer relationship to their ingredients.

LATURE

The Course

Within the restaurant, diners are first introduced to the Lature philosophy through a one-bite deer blood macaron, followed by a classic French cake salé made with all Chiba-raised ingredients, right down to the cheese.

Chilled Appetizer: Kurumi-soba inspired Yellowtail

Between the gibier-powered signature dishes, a few outstanding seafood courses serve as points of education and contrast. Nagano, a land-locked prefecture in central Japan with a long history of hunting, is also home to a local dish of buckwheat noodles served in creamy walnut paste. For the chilled appetizer, Chef Murota employs the flavor profile of that dish in a melange of domestic yellowtail dressed with brown mushrooms, their powder, and impossibly mild grapefruit. The course reminded us of both Kyushu’s local delicacy, goma-buri and the earthiness of kurumi-soba. Ultimately it’s a course that pairs perfectly with wild game, combining Japanese essences while maintaining French technique.

A Pair of Pies

Our course included two classic french dishes, both making use of a buttery pie dough to contain stacks of carefully layered ingredients. The pâté en croûte, a signature of Lature and an indispensable figure in French cuisine, featured layers of creamy foie gras, umami-rich wild boar, soft deer pâté, and hearty badger (anaguma) meat, all with different mouthfeel and flavor.

A jellied consomme and accents of fruity pickles and purees adds brightness to a classic chilled dish that pits different proteins head to head. Just enough “crout” pastry dough is present to hold its shape, but ultimately the dish becomes a mastercourse in wild charcuterie, allowing guests to enjoy the unique aspects of each animal little by little. By comparing the different delicious qualities of each protein, diners are able to appreciate the gifts of nature and understand the value and versatility of game meat.

The en croûte is followed by a beautiful beltfish (tachiuo) pie, first presented on a charming fish-shaped platter to represent its contents, then sliced in the kitchen for serving. You can easily smell the fresh pastry and brown butter sauce before it even lands on the table, still steaming.

Fish and sheets of nori alternate within, surrounded by a pillow of Chiba oyster and scallop mousse. Just enough herby green is present in the sauce to keep the luscious dish fresh and the flakey texture of the tachiuo provides an excellent contrast to the creamy pâté that defined the chilly pâté en croûte.

Having these courses back to back allows diners to appreciate the breadth of French cooking as applied to a range of ingredients. Done well, even similar dishes take on new life and remain interesting and thought provoking. Diners are invited to deeply consider the way temperature and density, red and white meat change the experience of a dish, which is both fun for passionate foodies and simply delicious.

Hokkaido Venison

The main dish is an Ezo-jika roast, nearly fork tender and still vermillion, cooked to perfection. Just a slight compression with the horn-handled knife is enough to cut cleanly through the lean, umami rich steak. The purity of spring deer is evident in the meat’s quality, enhanced even further by its accompanying sauce au poivre. Sunchoke, seri (Japanese parsley) and fragrant herbs add bitterness and textural interest that evoke a homey plate of steak and mash even international visitors will find hard to resist.

Dessert

The main dessert is a tarte citron served with salty butter cookie crumble and fuki no tou ice crystals. Fuki no tou, juvenile “heads” of butterbur, have a unique flavor and pronounced bitterness. It’s paired with everything from beer to berries and has been described as akin to basil, thyme, or rosemary in its ability to compliment intense fruity flavors. Here, a trio of citrus is accentuated by fuki no tou and rounded out by a crisp meringue. It’s no wonder the couple to our left also had nothing but praise for the refreshing dessert.

Finally, guests are left with a boar-fat financier and wild herb tea or coffee to finish. After enjoying the house made bread with a carved bird butter knife and appreciating the persimmon leaf-lined towel holder, it’s easy to see how many opportunities nature has to sneak into our daily lives if we welcome it. Here, a simple ingredient swamp does the heavy lifting.

No more pungent than butter but rich with the knowledge that its consumption is doing something a little nice for the planet, that financier feels like the perfect tie up to Lature’s adventurous course.

Lature’s Legacy and Meaning

Shots of Chef Murota’s activities outside the Lature kitchen. Photo courtesy of Lature

While Lature is a daily effort to educate and tantalize, Chef Murota’s philosophy continues beyond its walls. Outside of the restaurant, Chef Murota is a member of Chefs for the Blue, a cooperative of ecologically minded chefs and producers who host educational events and commit themselves to a more planet-friendly future for food.

He has worked with canned goods manufacturers to develop quick game-based products and hosts cooking workshops for young people to introduce gibier as a protein for home cooking, believing that if game can be accepted and spread to the dinner table as a staple, it could be the answer to some of Japan’s most pressing ecological debates. Perhaps one day his students could also become chefs, carrying Murota’s dream into the future.

To Chef Murota, it feels only natural that people should see themselves as members of the environment and its cycles, not separate from it. For this reason, the appeals of nature are incorporated into as much of his restaurant as possible.

Even the wine list balances French bottles with domestic ones. We enjoyed a Yamanashi-prefecture produced natural wine made from domestic koshu grapes. The owners of that vineyard too, speak to the importance of animals and uncontrolled nature in helping their wine become its best self. Even its moniker, Deux Lapins, invites the imagery of wild rabbits in a vegetable garden.

Sustainable Dining Now, and for the Future

Engraved knives use discarded antler for the handle

The efforts of figures like our wine maker, Domaine des Tengeijis, and Chef Murota rely on the power of the trickle-down effect. Once in a lifetime meals have the opportunity to change the hearts of average people. Many industry veterans know that trends in fine dining eventually make it into clamshell packaging at 7-11. It’s not a matter of advertising or propaganda, but a way to make use of humanity’s desire to share what we perceive to be worthwhile.

With luck, and hard work by chefs like Murota, wild game will enjoy the same success and come to be just as well loved and known to travelers as the iconic tamago-sando. For now, Lature is an example of gibier at its best, a worthy stop for anyone looking to try something unique and unforgettable during their visit.

LATURE

Disclaimer: All information is accurate at time of publication.

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