Hisato Hamada

Hisato Hamada is a Japanese chef, restaurateur and co-founder, with Takafumi Horie, of the Wagyumafia restaurant group — a network of small, members-only restaurants in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Las Vegas, Macau, Bangkok, Phnom Penh and Marrakech, each devoted to a single subject: the highest grades of Japanese wagyu beef and especially Kobe beef from Hyōgo Prefecture. Wagyumafia is the most internationally visible Japanese wagyu specialist of the 2010s and 2020s, and Hamada — who travels constantly to host service at each outpost — is its public face.

Hamada's path into the kitchen was unconventional. Born in Kobe in 1980, he originally trained as a journalist and producer, and through his twenties worked for media agencies in Tokyo with a particular focus on motorsport (he was for a period the manager of the Japanese racing driver Kamui Kobayashi). In 2014 he met the entrepreneur Takafumi Horie — the founder of Livedoor and one of the most controversial business figures of the Japanese 2000s — and the two began a casual side project, hosting small Kobe-beef dinners at a private apartment in Tokyo's Nishi-Azabu neighbourhood. They incorporated the project as Wagyumafia in 2016 and opened their first dedicated address, the eight-seat Wagyumafia Progress, that year. The original Tokyo flagship, Mafia Yakiniku, followed in 2017, and the first overseas Wagyumafia opened in Hong Kong's Sheung Wan in 2018.

The Wagyumafia format is unusual: each restaurant is a members-only counter (typically eight to fourteen seats) where Hamada — or one of his small group of trained chefs — personally butchers an entire A5 Kobe loin in front of guests before serving a tasting menu organised by cut, fat ratio and breed (Tajima-gyu, Matsusaka-gyu, Ōmi-gyu). The group's signature dishes — the chateaubriand katsu sandwich, the wagyu-fat hand-cut soba, the kobe-rib ramen — have become some of the most-photographed dishes in the global Instagram restaurant economy. The group operates eleven locations as of 2026 and has been credited (and criticised) for almost single-handedly driving the global premium-wagyu trade from a domestic Japanese market into a luxury export sector. Hamada has been a regular speaker at the World's 50 Best Chef's Forum and was named one of Eater's '20 Chefs Shaping Asia' in 2022.