When Italian chef Massimo Bottura arrived in Japan in late July to present a series of meals at the elegant Ritz-Carlton Kyoto, it represented quite a coup for the hotel in only its second year of existence. Just six weeks earlier, Bottura's restaurant, Osteria Francescana in Modena, had been voted into top place on the increasingly influential World's 50 Best Restaurants list.

Although he had presented some dishes in Tokyo last year, this was the 53-year-old Bottura's first time in Japan to offer a full multicourse menu of the inventive, artistic, contemporary Italian cuisine that has also won him three Michelin stars. Demand for tables was intense, with some customers arranging to fly in specially for the occasion from as far away as Singapore.

The setting was well worthy of the occasion. The Ritz-Carlton's flagship Italian restaurant, La Locanda, occupies pride of place on the hotel's ground floor and boasts a remarkable interior. The inner dining room was part of the old villa that formerly occupied this site by the Kamo River. Built in 1908 for the aristocrat industrialist Baron Denzaburo Fujita, the two beautifully preserved rooms boast wood panels and European light fixtures along with traditional Japanese motifs, and look out onto a dry-stone garden that is raked to perfection each morning.