Only a handful of restaurants in Tokyo have held three MICHELIN Stars for more than a decade. Quintessence is one, and it has not dropped a star since 2008. The reason to recommend it is not the stars but what sits behind them: there is no fixed menu.
Every day the kitchen does one thing. It looks at what arrived that morning and decides on the spot what the meal will be. The same guest coming today and tomorrow will not eat the same dinner, and last night's meal will not be repeated. This is contemporary French cooking carrying two Japanese ideas as far as they go — shun, and ichigo ichie, one time, one meeting. The season is never written into a menu, and the meal is born with the day and ends with it.
So it is the high point of an itinerary rather than a good Tokyo restaurant. Once guests grasp that every dish was made for this day and this table alone and will never be made again, the meal stops being a meal. The promise to an experienced gastronome is a single day, which happens once.