Crow meat, goat tartare: Mauvaise Herbe raises its game

Japan Times

19-04-2025

I'm early for dinner, so I ask the taxi driver to drop me a few blocks from my destination, a discreet restaurant in Ishikawa, a sleepy port about two hours north of Naha, Okinawa Prefecture.
Ishikawa sits on the east coast of the narrowest stretch of Okinawa's main island. As I kill time walking its streets, I pass flat-roofed concrete buildings, pastel paint faded and peeling from walls stained with mold, and traditional houses, weathered shīsā (guardian lions said to ward off evil)) at their gates, with gardens overgrown with weeds, where the crimson flowers of deigo (Indian coral trees) bloom. As I turn into a backstreet, jets from the nearby Kadena Air Base rumble overhead.
Unusually, the restaurant I'm headed to is not listed on Google Maps, but I recognize the three-story weatherboard building I'd seen at the address on Street View: first floor faced with fake stone, the entryway covered in cheap linoleum. Metal letters on the wall spell out the name, 'Mauvaise Herbe,' and I know I've arrived at the right place.
The restaurant only has a five-seat counter, which lets guests get up-close with chef Keiji Ojima's culinary repertoire. |
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As I enter, chef Keiji Ojima greets me from behind a five-seat counter, his welcoming smile framed by a goatee. He wears a black shirt, sleeves rolled up, and a grey apron. Behind him are jars full of dried leaves and mysterious things infusing in liquid. A snake skin is nailed to the wall, and shelves are stacked with rustic ceramic plates glazed, I'm told, with pig's blood. There are animal haunches drying inside a glass-doored cabinet; in a storeroom, rabbit and boar pelts hang beside scattered tools and boxes of straw. Black feathers are piled on a shelf, and I nervously spy 'crow' on the menu.
There seems to be sorcery afoot, and I'm intrigued by what magic is to come.
Okinawa beckons
Ojima, 55, didn't set out to be a chef. He was born in Miyagi Prefecture but grew up in Tokyo and Shizuoka Prefecture. After high school, he landed a corporate job with an airline, where exposure to different cultures and cuisines sparked his interest in food. In his early 20s, he decided to change direction.
In 1995, at the age of 25, he started working at a casual Japanese restaurant in Fujisawa, Kanagawa Prefecture, but says he felt completely useless there. One day, after being scolded by his boss, a customer — who happened to be a French chef — offered him a job at his restaurant in nearby Kamakura, marking his entry into French cuisine. After training in Tokyo, he spent a few months interning in Paris before returning to Japan to take a job in Okinawa — a place he'd been fond of since his airline days.
But the hotel restaurant in Naha, where he worked, felt soulless.
'I wasn't sure who my food was meant for,' Ojima says. 'It felt like I was cooking for no one.'
He returned to France, this time to Marseille, and stayed for nearly three years. There, he spent time with farmers and producers, learning the importance of the relationship between chefs and their suppliers.
Chef Keiji Ojima has taken an unconventional approach to sourcing locally, focusing on hunted game and invasive species found in Okinawa. |
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'When I came back to Okinawa, I remembered how stuck I'd felt before,' Ojima says. 'But I had a different mindset. I thought maybe I could actually build something meaningful this time.'
At 31, Ojima settled in Okinawa permanently, opening a catering business called Namae no Nai Ryoriten ('The Nameless Restaurant') in 2008. Over a decade, he earned a reputation for French-inspired meals crafted exclusively from Okinawan ingredients and established close ties with local farmers and hunters.
'Working directly with producers changed everything,' Ojima says. 'I realized my job is to simply communicate their work. It's not about showcasing myself but highlighting those behind the food.'
Still, with the whole island to choose from, Ishikawa seems an unlikely base. Ojima agrees that it's 'not the kind of place tourists come to have fun.' But its location right in the middle of Okinawa allows him to travel north or south easily when sourcing his ingredients.
'Honestly, (Ishikawa) kind of reminds me of Marseille,' he says. 'There's a small harbor behind here, and the vibe's a bit rough. There's something unspoken about it. And that, too, has meaning for me.'
Mauvaise Herbe, which opened in 2021, is not listed on Google Maps. Diners will only be told of the exact address after they have made a reservation. |
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In 2021, he opened Mauvaise Herbe. Through word-of-mouth, his tiny, reservation-only restaurant, hidden from Google Maps, began drawing diners from around the world
A wild feast
My dinner begins as Ojima places an ancient-looking bowl before me. He explains the simple, potion-like soup steaming inside is made from the dried and fermented roots of 10 local plants known for their medicinal properties, including Okinawan varieties of lettuce, carrot, fennel and coriander. Its distinctly earthy flavor lingers pleasantly on my tongue as I watch the chef prepare the next course: shin-tamanegi (new-harvest onions) aged in soil for three weeks, stuffed with creamy cheese and grilled.
'I don't use seasoning,' Ojima says. 'But in winter I make vinegar from fermented Okinawan cabbage and use that to flavor the onions.'
Ojima blends his original cooking methods with an equally unconventional sourcing approach. The entire omakase menu is Okinawan, except for minor seasonings. But the chef takes the 'eat local' mindset a step further than most. The meat he uses is particularly interesting, and the menu features hunted game, invasive species and animals whose meat would otherwise go to waste or are rarely eaten today. Highlights include Ayahashi beef sourced from retired wagyu breeding cows allowed to roam free and shimayagi, an indigenous Okinawan goat, which he serves next.
Goat meat is common in Okinawan cuisine, but Ojima mentions that most goats used today are hybrids of local and European species bred for size and yield.
'But the meat has a strong odor that tends to divide people,' he says. 'The shimayagi is smaller and produces less meat, so it was largely phased out. 'But their meat has (a) deep umami and a gentler aroma with almost no gaminess.'
Meat from "shimayagi," the island's indigenous goat, is turned into a tartare and served on a "senbei" (rice cracker) and paired with a goat-blood boudin. |
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The shimayagi graze on the bank of a river near Ojima's house, and he uses their shinshin (inner thigh), skin and neck for a tartare served on a thin senbei (rice cracker) made from fermented Okinawan wheat and rice. Underneath sits a warm bread roll stuffed with a goat-blood boudin, resting on leaves of native nikkei (cinnamon) and allspice, which he powders and uses to season the meat.
Next comes a pate en croute (meat pie) of wild Ryukyu inoshishi (boar) and shirogashira (light-vented bulbul).
'It's a very small bird,' says Ojima of the latter, which is classified as an invasive species in Okinawa. 'So we need to hunt it using air guns to make a clean shot.'
He minces its meat with the bones in and bakes it with the boar in a light and crumbly, almost fragile, pastry. A slice of the pie is then served with Okinawan roselle (an edible hibiscus) and karashi (mustard) seeds pickled in his homemade Chinese cabbage vinegar.
Apart from game, Mauvaise Herbe also turns local seafood into creative dishes that combine French and Japanese sensibilities. |
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Seafood dishes follow, including steamed yakōgai (great green turban) served with uzuramame (quail beans) foam and yakōgai liver sauce; raw akamachi (flame snapper) lightly steamed with flying squid ink sauce and fermented garum oil made from mizun (bluestripe herring); and seasonal kuruma ebi (Japanese tiger prawn) pie.
When the crow arrives, it's more confronting than I expected — its small black leg, talons clenched, like a shamanic warning
'This is the only species of crow in Okinawa,' says Ojima. 'It's native but is designated as a pest because they love citrus and raid the mikan (mandarin oranges) orchards in winter, when Okinawan varieties are in season.'
Ojima is the only chef on the island using the birds as food and works with local hunters involved in official culling programs. He only uses the thigh and breast meat, which he minces and shapes into balls. These he then forms around the leg, feet attached. Inside the meatball, a whole kinkan (kumquat) is hidden, a bittersweet nod to the birds' preference for citrus. The whole thing is then glazed with a syrup made from shikuwasa (Okinawan lime) before it's grilled.
It has to be said, I was rather apprehensive when I saw crow on the menu, so I am literally 'eating crow' when I discover it's surprisingly good — delicate, even.
Chef Keiji Ojima offers Ayahashi beef sourced from Okinawa's free-roaming, retired wagyu breeding cows. |
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A few more courses round off the meal, including roast inoshishi, a simple salad of foraged herbs and cream cheese, and frozen fromage blanc cheese dusted with freeze-dried beni-imo, the purple sweet potato so common in omiyage (souvenirs) that tourists take home from Okinawa.
Mauvaise Herbe means 'weeds' in French, and in this corner of Okinawa where tourists rarely tread, it seems perfectly apt for a restaurant that's thriving — rooted stubbornly and beautifully in a place you'd least expect.
Ishikawa, Uruma, Okinawa Prefecture 904-1105; guests will be informed of the address when making a reservation; mauvaiseherbe.okinawa.jp ; omakase menu: ¥20,000, drink pairings from ¥4,000; access by bus or car, nearest interchange Ishikawa IC; no smoking; no English spoken