Your Favourite Chef’s Favourite Chefs ft Kinoya's Kenji Miura

For all the chefs Kenji Miura has worked with across Japan, the Caribbean, and Dubai, his first authority on food remains his mother. She taught him taste — which, when you’re now the head chef of Kinoya, is probably the useful part to get right first.

Cooking came courtesy of his brother-in-law in Jamaica. Miura had moved there from Japan knowing how food ought to taste but not yet how to make a career of producing it; his brother-in-law taught him the mechanics. Years and several kitchens later, Miura landed at Kinoya with Neha Mishra, whose own education in Japanese food had been almost aggressively different. She taught herself ramen, served it to strangers in her home, and built the whole thing into Dubai’s Kinoya, currently No. 2 on MENA’s 50 Best Restaurants.

These days, Mishra handles the ramen development and Miura the izakaya menu, though neither operates in splendid isolation. Miura is now on Egypt’s North Coast leading Kinoya’s five-day run at WHEN WE EAT at Ramla by MARAKEZ, hosted at Moga.

For Your Favourite Chef’s Favourite Chefs, he gives us the three people behind the palate: his mother, his brother-in-law, and the chef he shares a kitchen with now.