When you take a step inside, you can smell the fragrance of fresh fish being fried, season’s vegetables bubbling gently being boiled into a soup, the whole area is filled with the aroma of happiness.

Located in Utazu, Kagawa prefecture, this is a small French restaurant at the foot of the Great Seto Bridge. Tomofumi Oguni, the owner/chef was born in Kagawa prefecture. He trained at a famous restaurant in Takamatsu and opened his long desired establishment in 2013.

The name of the restaurant is “Setouchi Shokudo OGUNI” (‘Setouchi Diner OGUNI’).
Mr. Oguni chooses the best French ingredients and matches them with vegetables and seafood from Seto Inland Sea and Sanuki according to season, with a view of creating slow French cuisine that is good for the body. The reason why the restaurant’s name includes “Shokudo” ‘Diner” is apparently because Mr. Oguni is aiming for light-heartedness and the flavor of French home cooking.
Enjoying the season’s products is supposed to be good for your health, is what Mr. Oguni says, and although his cooking is not too rich as it uses flavorings and sauces lightly, the flavors drawn from the ingredients are more than plenty, and everything is more than satisfying. Each bite is filled with happy flavors and you feel your body rejoicing with each one.

This dish, for example, from the beginning of summer is called “Seto Inland Sea Smoked Mackerel with Freshly-Picked Watercress Sauce”. It’s made by marinating and lightly smoking mackerel freshly caught that morning. When the chef receives the order, the mackerel is fried lightly from the skin side, and is brought to a mainly raw, slightly warm dish! The salad is created from the season’s vegetables provided by Mr. Mori, a producer from Tadotsu. The Japanese pumpkin, zucchini and other vegetables with French lentils are dressed in the salad, so you can enjoy many different textures. The sauce is made from watercress picked that morning. Its bittersweet flavor adds a nice accent and further arouses the appetite.

Another dish is “Kagawa-Grown Olive Beef Blade Roast with Mountain Burdock Sauce”. It is created with beef that has been fed on strained olives used for olive oil. The restaurant uses several rare parts out of the beef, and today they received some shoulder blade. The meat is taken from under the shoulder blade and there is not much of it. The great burdock used in the sauce has been gathered from the inner mountain area of Manno. The sauce is rich in fragrance and goes perfectly with well-marbled meat. The beef is garnished with French wild asparagus and, this also from a specific producer, Mr. Mori’s corn among other seasonal flavors.
Other rare beef parts used include tri-tip, aitchbone, round tip, and flank among others, and you can enjoy the differences between texture and flavor.

What impresses most of all is that the owner and chef couple always sees you all the way to the door when you leave, every time. That kind of simple and kind character is the flavor of OGUNI’s cuisine itself. Stop by when you are in Kagawa, without forgetting to reserve in advance.

“Setouchi French Shokudo OGUNI”
Address: 7-16 Hamaichiban-cho, Utazu-cho, Ayauta District, Kagawa Prefecture, 1st floor of States Ichibankan

Business hours: 11.00 – 15.00 (Last order at 14.00), 18.00 – 22.00 (Last order at 20.30)
*Priority on reservations (Please call before you visit)

TEL: 0877-49-0551

Homepage : http://setouchioguni.seesaa.net/ (Japanese)

 
Setouchi Photo-writers:
Text: Tomoko Kawai (Dream Network Activity)
Photographs: Takabumi Yanagisawa (Dream Network Activity)