Restaurant Tenguro Kitchen Building

A Kitchen Dressed as a Town House

Restaurant Tenguro Kitchen Building (料亭天狗楼調理棟, Ryōtei Tengurō Chōritō) is a two-storey timber building in Nakakojicho, Sabae City, Fukui Prefecture, built in 1926 as the restaurant's kitchen and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 17 November 2015. It has a tiled roof and a building area of 78 square metres.

It is joined to the north side of the Ryotei Building, the guest wing, and faces the road that runs along the east of the site. According to Sabae City, tradition holds that it was newly built when the Ryotei Building was moved here in the early Showa years.

The building is 6 ken long and 3 and a half ken deep, a Hirairi structure with its entrance on the long side, under a gabled Kirizuma-zukuri roof of pantiles.

Town-House Front, Working Kitchen Behind

It was registered as number 18-0140 for its contribution to the historic landscape, and what earned that is the face it turns to the street.

Both floors of the front are sealed in black plaster. On the ground floor a projecting lattice spans the central 3 bays. The upper floor is carried forward on cantilevered brackets in the degeta manner, with short wing walls at either end. A continuous eave runs along the street, its underside finished with a ceiling. The Agency for Cultural Affairs identifies all this as the traditional town-house form of the area.

The resemblance stops at the facade. A through passage with an earthen floor runs along the south end of the ground floor, and the building was planned from the start as a restaurant kitchen. Sabae City singles out that combination, a local Machiya exterior around a working kitchen, and ranks the Kitchen Building with the Ryotei Building as one of the few examples of restaurant architecture in Fukui Prefecture.

There is an inversion in the layout worth noticing. The guest wing hangs back, facing its garden, while Restaurant Tenguro Kitchen Building, the working end of the business, is the one that stands out on the street.

What to Look For on the Facade

The upper floor of Restaurant Tenguro Kitchen Building is plastered over its posts, so the black wall reads as a flat plane. Set against it, the fine vertical bars of the ground-floor lattice give the front most of its texture.

Across the central 3 bays of the upper floor, the openings show traces of iron bars that were once fixed there. The sources do not say what the bars were for, but the marks are worth looking for when you glance up from the road.

A board fence continues south of the Kitchen Building, and the front gate opens in that fence. Sabae City describes the kitchen front, the gate and the trees of the forecourt as combining into one fine streetscape.

Visiting

The interior of Restaurant Tenguro Kitchen Building is not open to the public, as Sabae City's heritage page states.

The front, however, is right on the road, so the exterior can be seen from the street. Together with the front gate, it is the easiest of the four buildings to see from outside. The facade faces east and catches the sun in the morning.

The road is a local street in everyday use, so stand where you will not block traffic. No guidance on photography was found.