Head Chef, Masakazu Kobayashi

Masakazu Kobayashi was born in Niigata Prefecture. After graduating high school, he started his career as a chef by training at a sushi restaurant in Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture. He then relocated to a kaiseki restaurant in Sapporo city, where he learned the spirit and craft of kaiseki cuisine.
He has been applying his skills at Elm Garden since 2004, and was appointed to his present role of head chef in 2014. Chef Kobayashi sources his ingredients directly from Hokkaido farms, and, through a process of trial and error, finds ways of incorporating them into Japanese-style cuisine. In doing so, he seeks to highlight the true value of Hokkaido-grown ingredients.