We headed over to the Mandarin Oriental tonight for a taste of chef Jacob Kear's famous Tapas Molecular Bar. This is a 7-seat restaurant on the 38th floor lobby of the Mandarin, with only two seatings per evening. It took forever to find a night that had all seven seats free, but the wait was worth it. That's the Mandarin's lobby below; it's probably the 2nd best hotel in Japan after the Ritz Carlton Tokyo, but I like the lobby design better. Nihonbashi, however, is dead at night.
You walk in to the left, and towards the back, near the lounge, is the Tapas bar, shown below. The area in the middle are for the two chefs, while the guests sit in a row, where the waitress is standing.
While everyone gets the set Tapas menu @ 12,000 yen per person, you can select what drinks, if any, you want to accompany your dishes. We went with the flights of champagne for 6,000 to 7,000 yen additional. The drink menu is below.
And here's the full tapas menu below.
Actually, there were a few starters that were not on the menu. Here's one of them - Beer with Yakult yogurt. The beer was just beer, but the yakult yogurt was very good.
The beer is served with Fried Shredded Red Beets - which you eat with your hands and are very very good. They also come with fried squid chips, which are made with home-made flour. They're some of the best chips I've had in Japan!
And here's the last of the unlisted starters - a "cloud" of foam. Very creative, but the heavy olive taste of the cloud made me cough.
And here we go into the full menu. We start with Caramel Corn Poppers. Basically, it's a Corn puree that's put into a liquid-nitrogen-frozen popcorn powder and caramel shell. You eat it in one pop, quickly. It's very very good, sweet and crunchy yet creamy!
The next dish is called Red. Why? Because everything is red. It has uni (sea urchin) from Hokkaido, saffron, and snow crab (zuwai gani). It was very good, especially the uni from Hokkaido. Don't eat uni from anywhere else. Hokkaido is the only place for "real" uni.
The next course is a scallop dish with pistacho dust, lime salt foam, bacon cream and sorbet - the scallop with bacon cream was more than excellent but the sorbet a bit weird. Doesn't seem to fit.
And here's a closeup.
Starting with the next dish, the chefs start to show off a little bit. Here, the chef is making a spaghetti noodle from scratch - using parmesan cheese with agar. 
The way you eat this is to mix the green basil and red tomato sauce with the noodles and suck them up all at once. Very very good.
The next dish is called sizzling beef, and it certainly does sizzle, but not because it was grilled or barbequed. The high-grade wagyu was first seared, and then quickly vacuum packed and sealed. It was heated to 53 degrees C for six hours. The beef was then taken out and put into a pressurized can for 24 hours. The pressure pushes the juices into the beef. Right before serving, the can is opened and the beef is cut. The "sizzling" is the release of the gases from inside the beef, pushing the juices out. It actually tastes like sizzling beef. Very good!
The next dish is a Greek salad to cleanse the palette. It comes with cucumber caviar, a hummus puree, pita bread, and a cucumber flower with diced yellow beets. You take the pita bread as a spoon and scoop - it's a very Greek taste, and the beets are very good!
Here's a close-up. The cucumber "caviar" were made right in front of our eyes with a chemical reaction. Very very good and very cool. This is a MUST SEE!
The next dish is Caprise - a mozzarella cheese ball with basil underneath for flavor. There's also a fruit tomato. You're supposed to take in a breath of the aroma of the basil, then eat a bit of cheese with a bit of the tomato. The cheese pops in your mouth - it's essentially a "liquid" cheese trapped inside a congealed ball of mozzarella made using the same technology as the cucumber caviar. This is a great dish, very very unique.
Now Jacob is searing the peach that does in as a garnish for the next dish - Secreta de Cerdo - or the Secret of Pork.
Here, spanish pork sauteed peach and broth made out of onion and bell pepper lift and enjoy the aroma - excellent pork very very good
The pork comes covered with a clear glass cup. Now what's the secret?
The secret is that when you take off the cup, a huge cloud of smoke pours out, revealing two VERY tender and VERY good pieces of pork. They're amazingly good actually. I still haven't figured out how they stuck all the smoke under the cup.
The next course is a Lobster Potato Vanilla bisque - it's butter poached lobster with a vanilla foam bisque and vanilla oil for aroma - I love seafood, so this is the best!!
Chef Kear is now preparing the Unagi Miso.
The idea behind the Unagi Pineapple Miso is that, layered together with a roasted avocado puree, the unagi and pineapple, if eaten together, will taste like miso. The problem is... it doesn't really taste like miso, but it does taste great. The unagi is from Japan, not China.
Closeup of the unagi dish above.
This next dish is my favorite cold dish of the night - called 196 Kyoho Grape - it's a Japanese Kyoho Grape-shaped hollow popsicle held at minus 196 degrees C. You eat it at once - and follow it up with the peeled REAL grape at the bottom. It tastes very much like the frozen juice concentrates you used to love as a kid.
The next dish was supposed to be seabass, but since they're supposed to be going extinct, or something to that effect, it was substituted with a red grouper. The red grouper isn't nearly as good as the seabass, which probably explains why no one has tried to eat them out of existence yet. In any case, until more seabass can be found, you'll have to make do. The vegetables are morel mushrooms from France, fresh snap peas and yellow rose with yuzu. This dish was OK, the fish wasn't flaky though and therefore, not as good as it should have been.
There's Jacob up top preparing the lamb surprise.
Luckily, there are still plenty of lambs to be eaten. Here's the rib of one lucky critter up top. This dish is creatively known as "Juicy Lamb" - one look at the picture below and it's clear why. The lamb was cut in two, stuffed with juice, and then resealed with a bio-glue. I'm NOT kidding. The glue was allowed to set, then the lamb was cooked, with the juice stuck inside. The result is a lamb that literally BLEEDS a dark red juice when you cut it open. Delicious.
This next dish is miso soup. Yup, that's miso soup below, with sprinkled wakame on top. You pop the whole thing in your mouth and chew. The soup is inside the congealed pouch - same technique as the cucumber caviar and the mozzerela cheese. Delicious, but a bit small.
We're slowing transitioning into the desserts now. Here's a Manchego and Apple eggroll. It's Spinach Cheese ice cream inside with a fried APPLE wrap outside - yes, that's not a flour wrapper. The crispy apple makes a great skin!! Excellent
Here's the last savory dish, and it's one I didn't really enjoy. This is fois gras and strawberry - The acid from the strawberry is supposed to cut through the fat of the fois gras, but it didn't really do the trick.
The desserts start for real here with Blue Hawaii - a liquid nitrogen infused frozen dessert. You only have 15 seconds to eat this once served. It's an amazing taste - you're guaranteed to blow some blue ice vapor through your NOSE on the first bite. But it tastes great, all ice cream should be so good! The best part is watching everyone else try it out.
And here's the first of the dessert platters. There's raspberry and black pepper, a saffron cocoa capsule wth a sugar dome, a chocolate truffle - with lots of air!, a rosemary gummy, cappucino, and NY cheesecake. All pretty good - though the cheesecake was the best.
Here' s the 2nd and final dessert dish. Notice they're all sour citrus fruits? That's because they give you a "Miracle Fruit" right before hand, which you're supposed to chew on and then spit out. The fruit makes almost anything you eat for the next hour or so taste sweet. It DOES really work!
Here's a quick note from Chef Jacob to thank us for coming. These chefs start everyday at 9am prepping for the night's 2 seatings. That's pretty amazing. For 12,000 yen per person all inclusive this is bar none the BEST bang for the buck in Tokyo. Everyone should try this at least once!
Here's a link to the restaurant's website
Address / 住所
Mandarin Oriental Hotel 38F, 2-1-1 Muromachi, Nihonbashi, Tokyo, Japan
Japanese: 東京都中央区日本橋室町２−１−１ Mandarin Oriental Hotel 38F
Click here for Google Map link
Hours:
Everyday: 6:30pm and 8:30pm seatings, only two per night, 7 people per seating only
You walk in to the left, and towards the back, near the lounge, is the Tapas bar, shown below. The area in the middle are for the two chefs, while the guests sit in a row, where the waitress is standing.
While everyone gets the set Tapas menu @ 12,000 yen per person, you can select what drinks, if any, you want to accompany your dishes. We went with the flights of champagne for 6,000 to 7,000 yen additional. The drink menu is below.
And here's the full tapas menu below. 
Actually, there were a few starters that were not on the menu. Here's one of them - Beer with Yakult yogurt. The beer was just beer, but the yakult yogurt was very good.
The beer is served with Fried Shredded Red Beets - which you eat with your hands and are very very good. They also come with fried squid chips, which are made with home-made flour. They're some of the best chips I've had in Japan!
And here's the last of the unlisted starters - a "cloud" of foam. Very creative, but the heavy olive taste of the cloud made me cough.
And here we go into the full menu. We start with Caramel Corn Poppers. Basically, it's a Corn puree that's put into a liquid-nitrogen-frozen popcorn powder and caramel shell. You eat it in one pop, quickly. It's very very good, sweet and crunchy yet creamy!
The next dish is called Red. Why? Because everything is red. It has uni (sea urchin) from Hokkaido, saffron, and snow crab (zuwai gani). It was very good, especially the uni from Hokkaido. Don't eat uni from anywhere else. Hokkaido is the only place for "real" uni.
The next course is a scallop dish with pistacho dust, lime salt foam, bacon cream and sorbet - the scallop with bacon cream was more than excellent but the sorbet a bit weird. Doesn't seem to fit. 
And here's a closeup.
Starting with the next dish, the chefs start to show off a little bit. Here, the chef is making a spaghetti noodle from scratch - using parmesan cheese with agar. 
The way you eat this is to mix the green basil and red tomato sauce with the noodles and suck them up all at once. Very very good.
The next dish is called sizzling beef, and it certainly does sizzle, but not because it was grilled or barbequed. The high-grade wagyu was first seared, and then quickly vacuum packed and sealed. It was heated to 53 degrees C for six hours. The beef was then taken out and put into a pressurized can for 24 hours. The pressure pushes the juices into the beef. Right before serving, the can is opened and the beef is cut. The "sizzling" is the release of the gases from inside the beef, pushing the juices out. It actually tastes like sizzling beef. Very good!
The next dish is a Greek salad to cleanse the palette. It comes with cucumber caviar, a hummus puree, pita bread, and a cucumber flower with diced yellow beets. You take the pita bread as a spoon and scoop - it's a very Greek taste, and the beets are very good!
Here's a close-up. The cucumber "caviar" were made right in front of our eyes with a chemical reaction. Very very good and very cool. This is a MUST SEE!
The next dish is Caprise - a mozzarella cheese ball with basil underneath for flavor. There's also a fruit tomato. You're supposed to take in a breath of the aroma of the basil, then eat a bit of cheese with a bit of the tomato. The cheese pops in your mouth - it's essentially a "liquid" cheese trapped inside a congealed ball of mozzarella made using the same technology as the cucumber caviar. This is a great dish, very very unique.
Now Jacob is searing the peach that does in as a garnish for the next dish - Secreta de Cerdo - or the Secret of Pork. 
Here, spanish pork sauteed peach and broth made out of onion and bell pepper lift and enjoy the aroma - excellent pork very very goodThe pork comes covered with a clear glass cup. Now what's the secret?
The secret is that when you take off the cup, a huge cloud of smoke pours out, revealing two VERY tender and VERY good pieces of pork. They're amazingly good actually. I still haven't figured out how they stuck all the smoke under the cup.
The next course is a Lobster Potato Vanilla bisque - it's butter poached lobster with a vanilla foam bisque and vanilla oil for aroma - I love seafood, so this is the best!!
Chef Kear is now preparing the Unagi Miso. 
The idea behind the Unagi Pineapple Miso is that, layered together with a roasted avocado puree, the unagi and pineapple, if eaten together, will taste like miso. The problem is... it doesn't really taste like miso, but it does taste great. The unagi is from Japan, not China.
Closeup of the unagi dish above.
This next dish is my favorite cold dish of the night - called 196 Kyoho Grape - it's a Japanese Kyoho Grape-shaped hollow popsicle held at minus 196 degrees C. You eat it at once - and follow it up with the peeled REAL grape at the bottom. It tastes very much like the frozen juice concentrates you used to love as a kid.
The next dish was supposed to be seabass, but since they're supposed to be going extinct, or something to that effect, it was substituted with a red grouper. The red grouper isn't nearly as good as the seabass, which probably explains why no one has tried to eat them out of existence yet. In any case, until more seabass can be found, you'll have to make do. The vegetables are morel mushrooms from France, fresh snap peas and yellow rose with yuzu. This dish was OK, the fish wasn't flaky though and therefore, not as good as it should have been.
There's Jacob up top preparing the lamb surprise.
Luckily, there are still plenty of lambs to be eaten. Here's the rib of one lucky critter up top. This dish is creatively known as "Juicy Lamb" - one look at the picture below and it's clear why. The lamb was cut in two, stuffed with juice, and then resealed with a bio-glue. I'm NOT kidding. The glue was allowed to set, then the lamb was cooked, with the juice stuck inside. The result is a lamb that literally BLEEDS a dark red juice when you cut it open. Delicious.
This next dish is miso soup. Yup, that's miso soup below, with sprinkled wakame on top. You pop the whole thing in your mouth and chew. The soup is inside the congealed pouch - same technique as the cucumber caviar and the mozzerela cheese. Delicious, but a bit small.
We're slowing transitioning into the desserts now. Here's a Manchego and Apple eggroll. It's Spinach Cheese ice cream inside with a fried APPLE wrap outside - yes, that's not a flour wrapper. The crispy apple makes a great skin!! Excellent
Here's the last savory dish, and it's one I didn't really enjoy. This is fois gras and strawberry - The acid from the strawberry is supposed to cut through the fat of the fois gras, but it didn't really do the trick.
The desserts start for real here with Blue Hawaii - a liquid nitrogen infused frozen dessert. You only have 15 seconds to eat this once served. It's an amazing taste - you're guaranteed to blow some blue ice vapor through your NOSE on the first bite. But it tastes great, all ice cream should be so good! The best part is watching everyone else try it out.
And here's the first of the dessert platters. There's raspberry and black pepper, a saffron cocoa capsule wth a sugar dome, a chocolate truffle - with lots of air!, a rosemary gummy, cappucino, and NY cheesecake. All pretty good - though the cheesecake was the best. 
Here' s the 2nd and final dessert dish. Notice they're all sour citrus fruits? That's because they give you a "Miracle Fruit" right before hand, which you're supposed to chew on and then spit out. The fruit makes almost anything you eat for the next hour or so taste sweet. It DOES really work!
Here's a quick note from Chef Jacob to thank us for coming. These chefs start everyday at 9am prepping for the night's 2 seatings. That's pretty amazing. For 12,000 yen per person all inclusive this is bar none the BEST bang for the buck in Tokyo. Everyone should try this at least once!
Here's a link to the restaurant's website
Address / 住所
Mandarin Oriental Hotel 38F, 2-1-1 Muromachi, Nihonbashi, Tokyo, Japan
Japanese: 東京都中央区日本橋室町２−１−１ Mandarin Oriental Hotel 38F
Click here for Google Map link
Hours:
Everyday: 6:30pm and 8:30pm seatings, only two per night, 7 people per seating only
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