Yutaka Ishinabe

Yutaka Ishinabe (石鍋 裕 "Ishinabe Yutaka", born 1948 in Yokohama, Japan) was the first French Chef in the Japanese cooking show Iron Chef. He appeared from the first episode in 1993, sporting a green outfit while holding a bell pepper. Over the years he has earned himself the nickname of "The Artist" for being creative with all his approaches to food. He has the highest winning percentage of any of the Iron Chefs due mainly to the fact he only fought 8 battles: he won 7 and lost 1. He is the only Iron Chef never to tie.

Yutaka Ishinabe ended his Iron Chef career at the end of 1993 due to the stressful nature of the program, which involved cooking under severe time pressure and facing judgment after battles. However, he remained involved with the series, competing in one battle as an Iron Chef during the convalescence of Iron Chef Japanese Rokusaburo Michiba and assisting Iron Chef French Hiroyuki Sakai as part of the French team in the "2000th Dish" Special. He also acted as guest commentator and judge on several occasions, most notably when regular commentator Dr. Yukio Hattori competed in a battle.

After being on Iron Chef, Ishinabe opened a chain of restaurants called "Queen Alice".

Memorable Battle

*Jacques Borie, A french chef who works in L'osler in Tokyo, and is the only person to defeat Yutaka Ishinabe. The theme ingredient was chicken. This was also notable as Chairman Kaga accidentally revealed the theme ingredient in his introductory speech, saying the word chicken instead of kitchen. He followed up on this error by declaring the theme ingredient to be kitchens before correcting himself.