Kanoe opened on Alameda Itu in Jardim Paulista in 2022 as the fine-dining sister of the Omotebako group — a small collection of Japanese restaurants run by chef Tadashi Shiraishi and his partners. In 2025, in the Michelin Guide's second Brazilian edition, Kanoe received a star. By then, it had already been the hardest reservation in the city for two years.
The restaurant seats nine. There is a single service each night. All diners arrive at 20:00 and eat together, course by course, as a group. Before the reservation is confirmed, the restaurant emails a questionnaire: are you right-handed or left-handed? Do you have any allergies? Do you prefer sake or wine? Tadashi Shiraishi uses the answers to set the counter — placing left-handed diners where the knife work is easiest to watch from that angle, adjusting the wine pairing on the day, customising portions.
The food itself is Japanese in an older sense than the current omakase fashion. Shiraishi's grandmother, born in rural Japan, taught him techniques that had largely disappeared by the time he trained professionally. The menu draws on those techniques: vegetables preserved with wood ash, fish aged in house-made nuka, soups constructed from dashi that has been reducing for days. There is almost no nigiri. This is not an Edomae sushi restaurant. It is an expression of Japanese home cooking sharpened to the level of Michelin-starred precision — a quieter, stranger, and in some ways more sophisticated programme than the city's other starred omakases.
Kanoe is not a performance restaurant. The chef speaks quietly in Portuguese and Japanese. The servers do not over-explain. The room is almost silent between courses. Diners who arrive expecting the theatre of the newer Brazilian omakase bars are sometimes confused; diners who arrive expecting Japan are moved. The price — above R$1,500 with pairings — is paid by a small, informed constituency that keeps returning every two months for the seasonal menu change.