From working at Vogue Italia to creating beautiful desserts with powerful messages at Faro in Tokyo, Mineko Kato likes to express herself. The winner of Asia’s Best Pastry Chef Award 2024, sponsored by Valrhona, reflects on her journey and explains there’s more to her dishes than first meets the eye
"Yes, this one does look beautiful… but the back story is terrible." Award-winning pastry chef Mineko Kato is holding up her smartphone to show off images of her recent creations. She’s also keen to explain how her work reflects contemporary issues, from sustainability and global warming to food waste and the loss of traditional agriculture practices.
As chef pâtissière at Faro in Tokyo’s upmarket Ginza district, it is Kato’s job to imbue the final courses of the meal with beauty, elegance and seasonality – along with the requisite sweetness. As the newly crowned Asia’s Best Pastry Chef 2024, sponsored by Valrhona, she recognises she now has a much wider platform for her gentle but uncompromising activism.
Born in Tokyo to parents in Japan’s diplomatic service, Kato travelled as she grew up, moving from the UK to Thailand and then to Italy, where she went to university and entered the work force as an assistant art director at Vogue Italia. But she found herself dissatisfied with the fashion industry and soon turned to the world of confectionery.
Mineko Kato wanted to work in a kitchen where she could truly express herself
For the next 10 years, Kato built up an impressive resumé, working at Il Luogo Aimo e Nadia, Enoteca Pinchiorri, Il Marchesino, Mandarin Oriental Milan and eventually Osteria Francescana. She says the two-plus years she worked in Modena under chef Massimo Bottura were crucial in her development.
"For me, it was a very important experience," Kato says. "In fact, the reason I work the way I do comes from him. Because I learned that food can be more than delicious, beautiful, interesting. For me, food is not fashion, it is so much more: culture, philosophy, our roots and our future. Through the food you select, you can decide your future. It's like an election."
Kato’s biggest decision was returning to her homeland. She hadn’t lived in Japan for many years and felt the urge to see and feel it again. But she didn’t want to work for a major restaurant or hotel, with all the unnecessary wastage and food industry compromises.
"I had offers from many restaurants with Michelin stars. But I wanted to be in a place where I felt comfortable, a place where I could plan and make my own dishes," she explains. "I need to feel free. If the chef is too important, the pastry chef has to follow them. When I arrived, Faro had no Michelin star, so it felt like I had freedom of expression. It was ideal as a stage for taking on the challenge of creating fully plant-based desserts."
Most of Kato's desserts are plant-based and have a powerful message behind them
As a student, Kato developed an interest in phytology, the healing power of herbs. And her social activism was well advanced before she joined Faro in 2018. The restaurant, then undergoing a major change of identity and cuisine, was moving towards a plant-forward menu, including fully vegan meals.
Kato’s desserts are colourful, aromatic and transporting, often expressing a powerful sense of connection with the natural world – and almost entirely plant-based. They bring the natural abundance of rural Japan into the heart of the city, while drawing the dining experience to its elevated conclusion. At the same time, each plate carries an important message.
Take her current signature dish, one that crowns every meal at Faro. It is a circular pastry base topped with a multicoloured profusion of flowers and aromatic leaves, underpinned by a simple soya milk cream infused with vanilla from sustainable agroforestry projects in Madagascar. She calls it Satoyama Flower Tart.
The stunning Satoyama Flower Tart has become a signature dish at Faro
Each bouquet comprises up to 50 different wild blossoms and herbs. They are collected and sent to her by farmers, many of them women in their 60s or over, living in remote villages around the country.
This is her way of supporting these dwindling communities, to offer them an alternative source of income. But it’s also her social commentary, pointing out that once this ageing generation has passed, the mountain villages – known in Japanese as satoyama – will likely disappear, along with their centuries-old traditions of sustainable ecology.
Another of Kato’s outstanding creations is a paean to rice – but also a silent and very visual reproach of the way Japan’s staple grain is produced on an industrial scale. She draws on the inherent sweetness of rice grown using natural farming methods by a community close to Lake Biwa in Shiga that shuns all artificial chemicals. Instead, farmers use the natural ecology of wildfowl, frogs and lake fish to fertilise the land and keep the bugs and weeds at bay.
Building up multiple forms and textures of ice cream, mousse and jelly, with added cream and sauce, she creates a transient artwork of dazzling white, which again is 100% plant-based and mostly made with rice. In Japanese, its name translates as The Future of Rice: in English it is simply called Ecosystem.
Kato only has one dessert in her repertoire that isn’t vegan. Comprising ice cream and panna cotta with meringue and sponge, it is her celebration of a dairy farm in Iwate in northern Japan, where the cows graze year-round in the mountains. There are no barns or artificial breeding methods. The cows stay in their families, giving birth naturally and suckling their young until they’re weaned.
Kato wants to use her position to help create a better world
A lot of Japanese people love butter, cream and milk, she says. But the mainstream dairy industry entails so much waste, discarding all the whey just to get the cream, and she questions whether sweets made with that cream can truly be called beautiful.
A third of global warming is caused by the globalised food system, Kato points out. Now with her new platform, she wants to get the word out. "Chefs and pâtissiers play a key role in gastronomy. We are innovators and if we can create a positive trend in the food system, making choices that influence the early adopters, I think we can help society to move forwards."
On a personal level, Kato says winning the Asia’s Best Pastry Chef Award was very emotional. "It was very unexpected and wonderful. Ever since I was younger, when I was at Osteria Francescana, I saw the 50 Best as a forum where chefs I knew and admired came together to work on social development [as with Massimo Bottura and his Refettorio project]. But it was always a dream for me, something very, very distant. I can still hardly believe it."
Now hear more from Mineko Kato, head pastry chef at Faro in Tokyo and winner of Asia’s Best Pastry Chef 2024, sponsored by Valrhona.
The list of Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants 2024, sponsored by S.Pellegrino & Acqua Panna, was announced at a live awards ceremony on Tuesday 26 March from Seoul. To stay up to date with the latest news, follow us on Instagram, Facebook, X and YouTube, and sign up to our newsletter.
