Restaurant Tenguro Ryotei Building

The Meiji Guest Wing at the Heart of Tenguro

Restaurant Tenguro Ryotei Building (料亭天狗楼料亭棟, Ryōtei Tengurō Ryōteitō) is a two-storey timber restaurant building in Nakakojicho, Sabae City, Fukui Prefecture, built in the mid-Meiji period and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 17 November 2015. It has a tiled roof and a building area of 198 square metres.

A ryotei is a formal Japanese restaurant where meals are served in tatami rooms, often to private parties. The Ryotei Building is the wing where Tenguro's guests were seated, and its name separates it from the kitchen, storehouse and gate registered alongside it.

It was built between 1883 and 1897, moved to its present site at some point between 1926 and 1945, and worked on again in 1966. The Agency for Cultural Affairs calls the 1966 work a renovation, while Sabae City's heritage page calls it a rebuilding, so the sources do not settle how far it went.

The building sits back from the road to the east. Its rooms are lined up to face a garden in the southwest corner of the lot, turning their backs on the street.

The Only One of the Four Registered for Its Design

Four structures at Restaurant Tenguro were registered on the same day. Three were listed for their contribution to the historic landscape. Restaurant Tenguro Ryotei Building alone was listed under the criterion of design that sets a standard, as number 18-0139.

The reasons lie in its plan and its ornament. Upstairs is a large banquet hall; downstairs are Zashiki rooms, each with a small anteroom. Sabae City notes that rooms of this type appear not only on the ground floor of the main block but on both floors of an annex projecting from it, and reads this as the mark of a building made for entertaining.

For ornament, the Agency singles out red walls and fan-shaped Shitaji-mado, windows that leave the wall's inner lattice exposed as a screen. Around the entrance the walls are finished in polished red plaster above a stone-faced base. The entrance floor is paved with Shakudani stone, a tuff quarried in Fukui, which the Agency treats as a regional signature.

Sabae City adds that the entrance area and the Matsu-no-ma, a ground-floor room in the rear annex, keep sukiya-style detailing typical of mid-Meiji restaurants, and that they show the building's original style. A door of rippled glass at the entrance to the ground-floor lavatory is given a sentence of its own.

The city calls the Ryotei Building the core of Tenguro and one of the few surviving examples of restaurant architecture in Fukui Prefecture.

How the Roofs and Walls Fit Together

The core is a gabled Kirizuma-zukuri block with its ridge parallel to the street, a little over 9 ken long and a little over 5 ken deep, the ken being the traditional bay measure. A tiled lean-to runs along the east side and a metal-roofed one along the west.

Behind it, fully two-storey wings turn at right angles and run deeper into the lot around the garden, roofed in a combination of Irimoya-zukuri hip-and-gable and plain gables.

The eaves show decorative rafters, and the upstairs windows carry handrails. Walls on both floors are Shinkabe, with the posts left visible and white Shikkui plaster between them. Against all that white, the red walls of the entrance mark the way in without any need for a sign.

Visiting

The interior of Restaurant Tenguro Ryotei Building is not open to the public, as Sabae City's heritage page states. The banquet hall, the zashiki and the Matsu-no-ma cannot be seen on a general visit.

The exterior is not easy to take in either. The street front is occupied by the Kitchen Building, the front gate and a board fence, and the Ryotei Building stands behind them, so only parts of it show from the road.

Whether Tenguro is currently operating as a restaurant, and whether a booking would give access to its rooms, could not be confirmed from public sources. Contact the restaurant directly before planning a visit around the interior.