Live shrimp covered in ants, anyone? Noma's Japanese restaurant serves up a rare treat

Tokyo’s restaurants are celebrated for serving the freshest seafood on the planet.

But at his new pop-up in the Japanese capital, the celebrated chef behind Noma, Rene Redzepi, has upped the sushi and seasoning stakes with a creation featuring live jumbo prawns, topped with tiny black ants.

The dish is the spectacular opening to a three-hour, 15-course tasting menu inspired by the same imaginative use of ingredients that have made his original Noma in Copenhagen arguably the best restaurant in the world.

At Noma Tokyo, perched on the 37th floor of the Mandarin Oriental hotel with views of Mount Fuji in the distance, the presence of half a dozen ants clinging to the wobbling flesh of each prawn is more than just a visual gimmick.

With their natural reserves of formic acid, the ants give the botan ebi – or botan prawn – a sour kick, described by Redzepi as the “flavours of the Nagano forest”, a reference to a mountainous region in northern Japan.

Noma has used ants in its dishes before, and Japanese diners are no strangers to eating still-twitching seafood: live octopus and whitebait are also considered delicacies here. But what do reviewers make of Noma Tokyo’s combination of the two?

Writing in the Japan Times Robbie Swinnerton described the tasting menu, which costs 40,200 yen (£225) per head, as “unlike anything anyone has ever served before in Japan”.

The black ants, he wrote, produce “little pinpricks of sharp acidity acting as a perfect accent for the sweet, pink flesh”.

In her review for Bloomberg, Tejal Rao recalled being confronted by a “pristine shrimp … so recently dead that its brain has yet to telegraph this information to the rest of its body. For now it’s all twitching muscle and whirring antennae”.

After regaining her composure, Rao described the sensation of biting into the prawn as “shockingly good”.

“It goes from terrifying to beautiful, like the ocean after a storm,” she wrote.

• This article was updated on 29 January: The cost of the tasting menu at Noma in Tokyo is 40,200 yen (£225) per head, not 149,500 yen (£837), as previously stated. The gender attributed to the Bloomberg reviewer was also corrected.