Nataraj Ginza

An idea that arrived before the plant-based boom

Founder N. B. Kahar started Nataraj in 1989 around vegetarian Indian cooking. Ginza became a roughly twenty-year chapter of that wider story, ending when redevelopment of its building prompted the restaurant to leave in March 2022.

Vegetables are the point, not the compromise

The restaurant describes cooking across India’s regional boundaries: beans, vegetables and soy meat, with different spice blends and onion, tomato or spinach bases. Its own farms in Minamiboso, Chiba, and Akeno, Yamanashi, supply seasonal organic produce.

For the Ginza restaurant, MUJI’s 2019 neighbourhood feature singled out the contrast between gently sweet pumpkin curry and the spicier soy-meat Nataraj Curry. It is a useful introduction to the range: creamy and mellow at one end, more assertive spice at the other.

The bread has a story of its own

Nataraj’s official site highlights Japanese wheat, natural-yeast fermentation and a tandoor oven. The pale-green komatsuna version became one of its recognisable breads; the Ginza feature described it as enjoyable even without curry. A meal here was as much about choosing the bread as choosing the sauce.

A quieter side of Ginza

The former restaurant occupied the seventh to ninth floors of the Ginza Kosaka Building. Time Out described a three-floor dining room and a vegetarian lunch buffet. This was a sit-down meal above the shopping streets, rather than a quick curry counter.