When Japan meets Bordeaux
Some restaurants are a lovely invitation to travel: Nama is one of them. Discover here a different concept where eating is synonymous of enjoyment. Through blind tasting, cooking local and seasonal food, Nama pushes a little further the hospitality with a staff also working
here since the beginning.
Patrick Herreyre has been working for 10 years in Japan for a famous wine merchant before coming back to his region, Bordeaux with one idea in mind: to open a fusion restaurant! He knows perfectly Japanese culture and speaks fluently the language: it was totally na-tural for him to create a bridge between French gastronomy and Japanese cui-sine! Nama, which opened in 2014, means “raw” but it also means “ambi-tion” and it is what you can feel while
tasting the Nama’s cuisine! Indeed, the Chef is playing with flavors from Japan but also with local and seasonal ingre-dients made in Southwest France.
The concept of Nama is also quite unique: everything is blind. You choose between 3 different menus, and you need to tell the staff if you have any allergies or special diet. The dishes arrive and you should guess what you are enjoying. What is also quite fun is that you can order a wine and food pairing with a little twist! It is what is called the “Battle”: two glasses of wine (or maybe something else…) poured blind and here also, you must guess what it is. You can then discover warm vintage versus cool vintage, Sauvignon Blanc from the old world versus the new world, white wine versus rosé wine…
Then, you can also select a bottle or just take a glass of wine in their wine list. The latter is not super long as they select very precisely the wines, and it changes quite often. Patrick and his team are going to different wine exhi-bitions like Millésime Bio in Montpellier or Salon des Vins de Loire; they also visit local wineries to enhance the Bordeaux style that we love. Obviously, the restaurant proposes also some Japanese sakés and spirits… And for those who doesn’t want to drink alco-hol, Nama selected a nice list of soft drinks (no Coca Cola here) with mar-velous teas from Japan and Taiwan as they match perfectly with their menus.
Nama has got a very nice reputation and it’s really a marvelous moment to go there: what are you waiting for ?