This comfortable, luxuriously spacious restaurant is designed around a "Napa Valley" theme and offers a big list of Napa wines. The food is first-rate international cuisine, and while many other wine-oriented restaurants in town focus heavily on the higher-priced bottles, Amandine lets you set your own budget, offering a big selection of wines in the Y3000-6000 range as well as more expensive choices.

The smoke-free main dining room has an airy feel to it, with a large, glass-walled wine cellar along one side and a semi-open kitchen opposite it. There's also a separate bar area, furnished with sofas as well as regular tables and chairs, to accomodate after-dinner drinks and smokes. The company that owns Amadine occupies the whole five-story building: they also run a cooking school, salon, bakery and cafe. The trade-off for all this space is the slightly obscure location, although it's only about five minutes from Ebisu station.

The restaurant's a la carte menu is small but diverse, with several vegetarian choices, and so far every dish we've tried has been fantastic. One recent standout was the chicken stuffed with goat cheese, pine nuts and spinach, a generous portion of chicken breast expertly grilled with a crispy skin and tender, juicy meat. The pork stewed with winter spices, served pot-au-feu style with root vegetables, is also quite nice on a cool winter night.

Speaking of vegetables, the chefs here clearly pay full attention to them, and they always seem like an integral part of each dish rather than an afterthought. Perfectly prepared and beautifully arranged, they often include unusual varieties that you don't run into every day, such as the tiny, almost berry-size tomatoes decorating our fish carpaccio. The grilled organic vegetable appetizer is a pleasure to behold - a wholesome and colorful assortment of seasonal vegetables served with blue cheese dressing and a light bagna-cauda style anchovy dressing on the side. If you really want to get exotic, the "garden" section of the menu offers a salad of organically grown flowers.

Other menu highlights include the scallop and beet salad, with big, juicy grilled sea scallops set off by intensely flavored chunks of beetroot. The cheese course - five well-selected cheeses served with figs, raisins, honey and crispy toast - is a nice way to wind down the meal as you continue to sip on your wine. Around seven or eight wines are available by the glass (generally Y650-800), with over sixty choices by the bottle. Budget around Y6500 or so for food and wine. There's also a five-course monthly tasting menu for Y4800 (without wines).

(Formerly known as C'zon.)