From office worker to award-winning gourmand: How biryani changed Japanese chef Takamasa Osawa's life

“Food transcends language,” says 36-year-old Takamasa Osawa, who owns a 10-seater restaurant in Tokyo that serves only biryani and has recently won a Michelin Bib Gourmand.

The chef, who is currently running a pop-up in Dubai at Yamanote Atelier — only on until Dec 2 — was an office worker at 20 when he decided to go to India’s Tamil Nadu for a holiday. He was out to explore, and although he didn’t speak the language, he managed to explore the state and its local eateries quite easily. “I was young — people were happy to help,” he shrugs.

When he came across a board that said ‘Biryani’, he was intrigued. “I had no idea what it was but rice is common in both Japan and India, and I have always loved to flavour mine,” he says. It was love at first bite. He smiles, looking wistfully out of the window of the Yamanote Atelier as he recalls his first serving. “That biryani changed my life,” he says.

He began to try as many versions of the fragranced rice-and-protein-combo as he could. By the time he returned to Japan that year (2009), he was obsessed. However, he found that like him, most Japanese people did not know what biryani was and he found it difficult to find a spot that could satisfy his craving for the hearty meal. At this point, he also found some people who knew how to make the dish — and while he learned the basics and says “it wasn’t difficult”, it wasn’t quite at the level he had first tasted in India. “I had to go back,” he smiles. And so he did.

In fact, he would spend the next 15 years going back and forth between Japan and India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh to learn about the various kinds of biryanis that exist and how to make them.

“I would smile and ask politely if I could see the process, see inside the kitchens, and maybe because I was a foreigner and young, they would let me in. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know the language. I learned by smell, taste, touch, and sight,” he explains.

He did not go to the five-star hotels that pepper each country or the well-known kitchens of famed chefs. Instead, he learned in local restaurants, canteens, and shacks that still carry the flavours of legacy. Where the prices are kept low and the recipes are handed down from generation to generation though whispered words and learned through the pains of little knife cuts and burns as one gets used to the pace and earns the badge of ‘belongs here’.

To learn you must do became his new mantra and every time he would return to Japan, he would try to perfect his craft that little bit more. As his friends started eating his dishes, they became routine customers, asking for an encore each week. When he was told the food was good enough to sell, he thought about opening his own restaurant, eventually starting a little pop-up in Tokyo that was in business twice a week. “It did not work,” he says simply, pointing out once again that most people in Japan don’t really know about biryani.

“I thought I’d just cook for my friends,” he adds. So he and his friends pooled in their money and rented out a house, one where they all lived together. “And I cooked biyani for them every day,” he says. It helped him hone his skill and with the feedback that he received each day, he says, it just got better. This also allowed him to experiment with recipes and variations. “I ended up making biryani everything — and then I made biryani for the Japanese kitchen where the spices were often different than the ones you’d find in Indian homes,” he says.

“Biryani,” he says, “is about umami and fragrance.” And he tried to replicate this using local flavours. So shiitake mushrooms got a dash of soy sauce and the kachumber salad — cucumber, onion, tomato, lemon and chili that’s a fine accompaniment to biryani — got a wasabi twist.

“You can make biryani out of most proteins,” he says, adding sheepishly, “But I like mutton best.”

He opened a restaurant in Tokyo in 2021 and although, he says, “people in Japan don’t want to try new fusion food”, they are interested in authentic cuisines from around the world.  

Now, as his version of the biryani goes viral, he has bigger plans. “I want to expand to another country, which knows biryani, like Dubai. If I go to India, it’ll have to be Hyderabad. It is after all, the biryani capital.”

For now though, he’s serving up a bento box in Dubai. The menu includes a choice of two biryanis from a menu of four — mutton, chicken, lobster, and shitake mushroom — with a side of raita, kachumber, rice cracker with cream cheese and pickle, and pickled ginger. It’s a little bit of Japan, a little bit of India, and a whole lot of deliciousness.