When it comes to eating in Tokyo, you might think only of impossibly fresh sushi, bowls of ramen, and melt-in-your-mouth Wagyu steaks. But over the past few years, Japanese chefs have branched out, mastering Italian cuisine and creating French food that would fascinate a Frenchman. Most amazingly, they're reinventing Chinese. Alan Richman gets lost in the pleasures of Tokyo, a place where nothing is good enough unless it is perfect.
Susumu Kakinuma and I bonded instantly. We had this in common: He loves belted 7.62-millimeter NATO ammunition, standard for the M60 machine gun. Shells are all over his Tokyo pizzeria, even strewn around the ladies’ room. I used to love firing 7.62-millimeter rounds from an M60 machine gun.
I told him I’d been in Vietnam. True. I told him
I’d fired off hundreds of 7.62-millimeter rounds. Also true. It just happened that I’d fired them in training, not in battle. In fact, I’d seen a lot more pizza than combat in Vietnam. No reason he had to know that.
Kakinuma, one of the best pizzaioli in Tokyo, is the owner of Seirinkan and an authority on Naples-style pies. I know a lot about pizza, too.
I once spent a week in Naples, fascinated by its pizza ovens. They are crazy hot, ingot hot, but while I was there, timing every pie I ordered, none came out in less than seventy seconds.
I asked him how long his took.
“Sixty seconds,” he said.
“Impossible,” I replied.
He smiled confidently.
In went the pie. Out came the pie. Sixty seconds. Not fifty-nine or sixty-one. He said his oven was probably 900 degrees.
Chef Susumu Kakinuma of Seirinkan works his miracle pizza oven
I could not have been more impressed. In honor of our instantaneous friendship, he asked me to follow him, and he led me down a spiral staircase to the basement. He slid back a door marked private (in English). Inside was a tiny bar, a shrine to Gene Krupa, complete with a few of his drums.
I had found paradise. Upstairs, Kakinuma prepares two kinds of pizza, marinara and Margherita, because that’s what you get at his favorite pizzeria in Naples. (I preferred the marinara, because the tomato sauce and garlic were so vivid.) His crusts are soft, chewy, puffy, slightly charred, and incredibly tender.
Pizza at Seirinkan
Seirinkan—roughly translated, it means House of Hollywood—is primarily a tribute to Jules Verne. It looks a little like a submarine. The oven resembles those on coal-fired boats or trains. Outside, by the entrance, are a camp table and chairs, maybe military, British-made. Upstairs are old Soviet military posters. The indoor chairs appear as though they were salvaged from an abandoned church—they’re wooden and have little pockets that could hold prayer books. The walls are painted battleship gray.
Kakinuma, who is 49, told me that he learned to make pizza by eating pizza. He said, “Almost fifteen years ago, I was eating out in Naples. Not cooking, just eating out. For one year, I had at least a pizza a day, every day.”
And so he came home and built a pizzeria. With all the accoutrements.
You might call the man obsessive. I don’t believe he would take offense. In Japan, such compulsiveness is said to result from an oppressive society that disapproves of personal expression. Schools are regimented. Jobs, historically, are for life. A section of society tests boundaries. Individuals break away, desperately in need of singularity.
Kakinuma also liked me, I suspect, because of my obsession with the cooking time of a Naples pizza.
Down in his tiny bar, maybe 200 square feet of space with a half-dozen red velvet barstools, tiny red-shaded sconces, and a miniature red velvet couch, he has a DVD player and a small movie screen. He put on Silk Stockings with Fred Astaire and left me there, confident I would be happy. He said, “When the customers come down here, they don’t want to leave.”
Now you understand. This wasn’t my favorite restaurant in Tokyo. This was my favorite place in Tokyo.
*****
kakinuma might be on the fringe of society, but he’s really very Japanese, not an anomaly at all. In his own peculiar and immoderate manner, he is a practitioner of The Way. To the Japanese, that means doing things right. They are not inventors as much as they are craftsmen, although that does not do them justice. They perfect. They improve. They burnish.
They have done so with automobiles. With TVs and radios. With comic books. And with food. Today, no city is embracing international cooking more intensely than Tokyo—one estimate puts the number of Italian restaurants at 2,000. It’s a reflection of the awe that the Japanese feel for the most honored cuisines of the world.
I’ve heard repeatedly that the Japanese who apprentice at great restaurants work absurdly long hours without complaint. They learn to replicate the food, and once they return home, they are unwilling to deviate from their training. Out of respect for the traditions of the cuisine they’ve studied, or from lack of confidence in their own worthiness, they slavishly adhere to classic principles. Improvisation, I was told, is not consistent with The Way.
I went to Japan to learn what Japanese chefs were doing with non-Japanese food, and to be honest, I was anticipating more than echoes and imitations. I’ve always felt that the Japanese were too motivated to settle for mere repetition. And when it comes to chefs, I don’t know many so unimaginative that they will remain uninspired.
My plan was to learn how the Japanese dealt with the food of Italy, France, and China. Those are the cuisines that travel best, or at least most frequently. (I thought of adding Mexican to the list but gave up shortly after arriving in Tokyo and having lunch at a kitschy joint where the Japanese waitresses dressed like Aztec sacrifices.)
I wanted Japanese chefs only. And I wanted Japanese-owned restaurants. Even though high-end chains, particularly those with French credentials, have been accepted unconditionally in Tokyo, I wanted no part of them. (Nobody should want any part of them.) I had plenty of choices, too. Tokyo has about 160,000 restaurants, far more than any American or European city. The simple explanation: Almost all of them are small.
I couldn’t hope to be comprehensive, but I wasn’t the only visitor so challenged. While I was there, Michelin released a guide to Tokyo restaurants that was shockingly sketchy. It didn’t attempt to make sense of the city, as Michelin has always done elsewhere. The reviewers listed the 150 restaurants they liked best, gave them all stars, added a few meaningless platitudes, and left. It reminded me of the best advice given America during the Vietnam War: Declare victory and go home.
I understand how daunting Michelin’s undertaking must have been. I probably couldn’t have located any restaurants without assistance. It’s important to know this if you are traveling to Tokyo: If you expect to leave your hotel, hop into a taxi, hand the driver an address, walk into a restaurant, and select a meal, you could not be more ill-informed.
The taxi drivers couldn’t find Mount Fuji if it was staring them in the face, which it is. (And they have GPS in their cabs.) The restaurants seldom offer any language other than Japanese—you’ll be lucky to find a French or Italian menu anywhere French or Italian food is sold. The streets rarely have signs, and the buildings are cursed with a numbering system that is incomprehensible even to the Japanese.
I had guides: Shinji Nohara, a Tokyo food writer who led me on most of my expeditions, and Yukari Pratt, a chef, wine authority, and journalist. I selected my restaurants based on advice from them and other Japanese experts. Everywhere we went, with few exceptions, Nohara or Pratt had been before. They got to places new to them by sticking their heads out taxi windows and asking strangers for directions. Tokyo is that tough. Nohara was determined to teach me the subway system, but after he accomplished that not-too-difficult mission, I still remained helpless.
One sunny afternoon, after I’d been in the city for more than a week, I left my hotel on a solo adventure: I sought lunch.
I had one of those little maps that hotels hand out to guests. The concierge had precisely marked the location of a particular restaurant. I had its name written in both English and Japanese.
For nearly two hours, I walked the streets, searching. Finally, hopelessly lost and frustrated, I walked dispiritedly into a McDonald’s and had the McPork sandwich, a minced-pork patty with sticky sauce on the hundred-yen menu. Well, I did say I was there to eat foreign food.
*****
ristorante terauchi is one place in Tokyo not difficult to find. It’s across the street from an American military compound, Hardy Barracks, and you’re likely to see, as I did, a helicopter landing to drop off American VIPs. This distresses the oft-protesting locals, and I sympathize with them—if I lived in the heart of Manhattan, I wouldn’t appreciate Japanese choppers landing on my block to drop off Japanese admirals.
Ristorante Terauchi is expensive, too. You have undoubtedly heard about the high cost of dining in Tokyo. At Terauchi, so Tuscan it might well be in Florence, I rashly accepted a suggestion from my waiter that I upgrade a plate of sliced meats from normal to deluxe. The charge rose from $29 to $58.
The specialty of this stucco-walled establishment is grilled meats, but I thought the best preparations of owner Masayuki Terauchi were grilled vegetables, chicken-liver crostini, and pasta with white truffles, only a few dollars more than pasta without white truffles. “Truffles are normal in this restaurant,” Terauchi told me. I wasn’t quite able to determine how food was priced in Tokyo restaurants—randomly, I suspect. At this sixteen-seat, open-kitchen Italian spot, I seemed to have paid more for cold cuts than for white truffles.
Terauchi was the first of numerous chefs I met who had no formal training in the cuisines they were preparing but had learned independently. He once traveled through Italy for an intense month and a half, spending $30,000 on Italian food.
Ristorante Terauchi's pasta with truffles
One of the genuine bargains in Tokyo is a friendly, modern neighborhood spot called Ostü, close to the exemplary Park Hyatt hotel—you know it from the film Lost in Translation. The chef, Masato Miyane, worked for six years in Italian restaurants, including the wonderful Al Bersagliere in Lombardy, and also at Locanda Nel Borgo Antico in Barolo, where, he said, “I drank a lot of wine.” He makes four or five kinds of fresh pasta daily.
I ordered a small three-course luncheon menu for about $17 and splurged by requesting my pasta with black truffles, a $4.50 option. Try finding that kind of bargain in Italy. Miyane’s rationale for becoming an Italian chef was fundamental. “When I was a child growing up, I preferred pizza and pasta,” he said.
I ate only one poor meal in Tokyo, at the well-regarded Acqua Pazza. The dining area is belowground, which wouldn’t be terrible had the designers made some effort to make it feel as though it were not belowground. I have to concede that for a subterranean restaurant, Acqua Pazza attracts a fashionable clientele.
The evening I went in, a group of businessmen were dining in a private room, and several geeky guys wearing high-top sneakers and knit watch caps pulled low over their eyes were dining with their families, a baby included. Over the course of the meal, one of them took off his sneakers, which would have detracted from the ambience if Acqua Pazza had any. The kid and I were both on the verge of crying, but for different reasons.
In my case, it was the wine list. Acqua Pazza offered the most overpriced bottle of wine I saw in Tokyo, perhaps the most overpriced wine I’ve seen in my life. It was a 1990 Gaja Barbaresco for about $7,000, around twenty times retail. I assumed it was there in the faint hope that a Japanese businessman dining with a big-haired hostess picked up in a Ginza bar would wish to dazzle her with his wealth, although the restaurant later claimed it was a misprint. The real price was $700, not enough to impress a hostess with big hair.
Should you decide to patronize this establishment, I recommend avoiding the wine list. I also recommend avoiding the freshly made squid-ink pasta. It was bleeding ink that inundated everything, including the cuff of my jacket. The preparation included mushrooms and diced squid, both absolutely black, whether from the ink or from natural causes I could not determine. A tasty fried-basil topping survived unstained.
After evading a hard sell of grilled oysters, I agreed to the signature dish, “today’s catch in a sizzling water.” The water, laced with bits of clams, dried tomatoes, olives, and capers, was fine. The fish was overdone, basically mush. Acqua Pazza reminded me of a style of Italian dining so often encountered in America, the overwrought and overpriced caricature. The other Italian restaurants I tried were clearly in search of authenticity, which is invariably the smartest plan. Italian food rarely rewards experimentation.
Still, I was hoping for something more than mimicry—a little creativity is always excusable. It’s also necessary, because the flavor of Italian products is so difficult to duplicate in other countries. When in search of Italian restaurants outside Italy, I always hope to stumble upon chefs who capture the spirit of Italy, and none did that nearly as well as Tomofumi Saito of Il Ristorante Nella Pergola. His restaurant is sleek, modern, and understated, and he is a chef of near zealous passion.
I got the impression that the man rarely sleeps, so busy is he perfecting his cuisine. “I’m Japanese,” he said. “My mind-set is how to think about life and pursue perfection—how can I as a Japanese person make it better. I work late to make that point.” He, his wife, and three assistants operate this fourteen-seat restaurant on the ground floor of a medium-rise building across from a convenience store. That won’t help you find it, since most of Tokyo appears to consist of medium-rise buildings across the street from convenience stores. (Usually, these convenience stores are packed with grown men standing by the magazine racks, rapturously reading comic books.)
Nella Pergola has an oversize reception area where more tables could go if Saito was of a mind to add them, a large table in the -center of the room holding digestifs and wines by the glass where more tables could go, plus a glassed-in garden where I thought more tables could go, but I was told that was forbidden by the landlord. Quite a country: Profit isn’t everything, even to property owners.
A sautéed sardine at Il Ristorante Nella Pergola
From the first plate—not melon with cured pork but melon sorbet with cured pork, a concession to a warm evening—I knew this was it. If Saito’s food doesn’t taste exactly like that of Italy, it is purely because so many of his products are local, and nobody would deem that a weakness. I don’t think I’ve had an Italian tomato the equal of his Japanese tomatoes. I was elated by a meaty sardine and by a lightly breaded, abnormally juicy veal chop. When I called his food special, he called it the food of normal life, an exquisite definition of Italian cuisine.
Saito is also the pastry chef, and his deconstructed tiramisu—a skeletal chocolate biscuit, mascarpone cream, coffee granita—might be the best that hoary old dessert has been. He learned his craft in northern Italy and picked up lessons in press relations from Cesare Giaccone, one of the true eccentrics of Italian cuisine, a man who rejects attention. Maybe that’s why Saito didn’t seem particularly impressed when I told him that his was my favorite Italian restaurant in Japan.
Dessert at Il Ristorante Nella Pergola
*****
if any cuisine in Japan does not fit the image of what a local diner would appreciate, it’s French. Yet the food has been embraced unreservedly and rapturously—possibly because the Japanese venerate such chefs as Joël Robuchon and Paul Bocuse. French food is full of cream and butter, which Japanese food is not. It’s prepared exuberantly, in contrast to Japanese food, which is often so restrained it seems not to exist. Portions are plentiful and fixed-price meals staggeringly large—the Japanese appear to possess the appetites of midwestern truck drivers.
Kazuhiko Kinoshita, chef-owner of the restaurant Kinoshita, offers fixed-price meals of extraordinary value and astounding complexity. I selected a nine-course menu, nothing extraordinary by Japanese standards, and happily noticed that it included an intermezzo of a carrot puree under a light tomato gelée. Japanese chefs embrace all culinary possibilities in the French repertoire, including the largely abandoned concept of the palate-cleansing intermezzo. I suspect they leave nothing out for fear they might be accused of parsimony. Table settings give a hint of the quantity to come: At one point during my meal, I counted eight forks, knives, and spoons surrounding my plate.
Kinoshita resembles one of those angry sushi chefs of legend. He stands glumly behind the counter of his open kitchen, his head semi-shaven, as though he hasn’t gotten around to sprucing up. The extent of his visible attire is a white T-shirt and a stained apron. I admired the no-nonsense look.
His restaurant seats about thirty, and the decor is unremarkable, although that might be giving it too much credit. A wreath made of wine corks graces the wall just inside the door. The ceiling has exposed pipes and the banquettes appear to be cushioned in red velveteen. Oddly enough, I admired this look, too.
This might be the best spot in the city to drink high-quality French wine: 1985 Krug champagne, about $330, which is less than retail; 2002 J.-F. Coche-Dury Meursault, about $210, less than retail; 2001 Ponsot Clos de la Roche Vieilles Vigne, $170, about retail. It’s also one of the best spots in Japan to eat: No starter I had surpassed his savory leek blancmange surrounded by an intensely rich shrimp bisque. That preparation summed up his style: complicated, intense, yet wondrously light. The salmon was heavily smoked yet ethereally delicate, topped with frizzled potatoes. He offers foie gras two ways, the terrine with a caramelized-sugar topping and a sautéed version atop mushrooms (with more shaved truffles, which again seemed to cost nothing at all).
Smoked salmon topped with frizzled potatoes at Kinoshita
Kinoshita, who is 49, came to the profession late, when he was 30, and learned a great deal from cookbooks, including those of Joël Robuchon, which might account for the intricacy of his dishes. He told me he became a French chef because “I thought French chefs were cool and I would impress people by being one.” Then he smiled slightly. “Once I became a chef, I realized it was not so cool, you don’t make much money, and it is tough. But it is a great job.”
His food has flourishes, but they are subtle ones: “I cannot get rid of the classic because it is the basic, the backbone. Human beings cannot live without backbones.” He admitted that he does not stray far from the traditional, because he hasn’t been to France and worries about criticism from those who would say such a chef is not qualified to rework French recipes.
For sheer quantity of substantial French food at a very good price, about $80 per person, I appreciated L’Ami du Vin “Eno,” which has an utterly perplexing menu that I never did figure out. The wine list is good. The service isn’t, inasmuch as there isn’t much of it. One gentleman was waiting on all tables, trying to transport massive quantities of food. He was, I suspect, the owner, and he apologized, saying, “It’s just me.”
The foie gras terrine was well-balanced, the turbot expertly grilled, and the crusts on both the sweet and savory pies wonderful. The chef’s weakness is his sauces, consistently thin. L’Ami du Vin “Eno” reminds me of those restaurants that could be found decades ago across the street from French train stations, catering to travelers passing through town.
The epitome of Japanese dining is Kitajimatei, minute and hidden, thoughtful and respectful, elegant and cautious. It should not be missed if you can locate it. The taxi driver, baffled, let Nohara and me off a block away, and we walked down a street that wasn’t more than an alley, finally coming to a faded yellow canopy. The dining area has a few decorative items a little better than flea-market quality, plus ice-cream-parlor chairs. Table settings are splendid. I loved the amuse-bouche, a buttery croissant with an anchovy tucked inside.
Kitajimatei's anchovy-croissant amuse-bouche
The first plate from chef-owner Motoyuki Kitajima, who trained at the monumental French restaurants Troisgros and Georges Blanc, appeared to be his signature dish—sea urchin in consommé with a garnish of cauliflower cream, the essence of silkiness. He then brought out a huge whole snapper that he’d gotten from the fish market that morning, an irresistible offering, sliced off a chunk, and panfried it. The promise of fish this fresh sounded hard to beat, but the preparation was overseasoned, reminiscent of Indian food. The beef was Wagyu, and out came a Laguiole knife to slice it, though it was so tender no such implement was required. Dessert was roasted chestnuts, exquisite green grapes, and Asian pears. I think this restaurant, more than any other, made me understand how artfully Japanese and French tastes can merge. They were almost seamless in Kitajima’s kitchen.
Quintessence was the most prominent of the restaurants I visited. It had just gotten three stars from Michelin, and the entrance to an otherwise stark and minimalist establishment was crammed with bouquets sent by well-wishers, lending much-needed color and warmth. Chef Shuzo Kishida, 33, once worked at Astrance, a relatively new three-star in Paris, and the restaurants operate similarly: The chef selects your menu. The only choices you get at Quintessence are wine and water—fourteen kinds of bottled water, in fact.
Of all the dishes I ate there, the one I will not forget is the duck—incredibly juicy, accompanied by a mustard-walnut-mango sauce much less aggressive than it sounds, a sauce that did not detract from the brilliance of this duck. It was duck from France, a country that knows its duck in the same way that Japan knows its fish.
*****
in tokyo, ladies lunch, more passionately than in New York or Los Angeles. You might be under the impression that men run Japan, but not the households and particularly not the household finances. As a Japanese woman explained it to me, “The women go to lunch and talk about how hard they work for their kids, what bags they bought, and bitch about their husbands.” Funny that no matter how far you go, even halfway around the world, nothing changes.
Wives allocate money to their husbands to spend at work and for a few drinks after work—nobody wants the husband home too early, because that shows he isn’t successful or, worse, that he’s been fired. While the husbands are away, the ladies lunch. If the women are young, not married, and living at home, they’re more likely to go out to lunch, because they have so much disposable income.
One of the most fashionable and unusual luncheon stops is Shirokane Ryuan, which is in a section of Tokyo comparable to Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The specialty of this Chinese restaurant is collagen, the structural protein that holds the body together, usually with difficulty in old age. This lovely restaurant, across from a park and overhung with branches and leaves, is where women become young again through proper diet. The owner, Masanori Nasu, looks, acts, and sounds like Pat Morita’s Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid. He is both serious about the healing power of his food and amused by the expectations of his customers.
“I have a lot of overweight customers come in and think they can become skinny by eating here,” he explained. “I have customers who are 92 years old coming in and saying, ‘I want to have pretty skin. What soup do I eat to make my skin beautiful?’ ”
When I expressed doubt that his cuisine could work miracles on one such as me, Nasu studied me. He is 57 years old. He did a full split at my table, then raised his leg over his head.
“Martial arts?” I asked.
“Modern ballet,” he joked. (He speaks more English than he lets on.)
Masanori Nasu of Shirokane Ryuan sips his platinum elixir
He is a former public-relations executive who by happenstance got into the unusual business of anti-aging gastronomy. He prepares food from historical recipes and adds a little spin, naming some of the dishes after famous beauties (who aren’t around to claim royalties). The interior of this serene restaurant has screened-in private-dining compartments and a matted floor. He walks around in a samue, a Japanese robe traditionally worn by temple monks.
Nasu’s food is colorful. He claims that’s because in days gone by, before the understanding of vitamins and other nutritional properties, people instinctively knew that eating food of many colors would ensure a well-rounded, nourishing diet. “Modern medicine focuses on one thing. Old-time medicine was the whole package,” he explained. Most of what I ate there was recognizable Chinese food, somewhat rustic but flavorful and vigilantly prepared. My dumplings were filled with pork, shark’s fin, and shark’s lip—plenty of collagen there. His recommendation for me was a soup to enhance virility.
A modest-size bowl of this potion, which he claimed took three days to prepare, cost $65. It was made from ham, pork, scallops, and melted deer antlers, which supposedly have effective anti-aging properties. The broth was superb, perhaps the best and certainly the costliest consommé of my lifetime—although now that I’ve drunk it, I’m sure I’ll have extra decades to consume plenty more. I noticed something immersed in my bowl, something weird, something that I half-jokingly said resembled the worm in a bottle of mescal.
Turned out I wasn’t far off. It was, he explained, the remains of a high-altitude hibernating bug that is attacked by a fungus and becomes a mushroom. That was the beastie in my broth. Eating it supposedly transfers into the wan body of the recipient the strength of an animal able to exist in the mountains of Tibet at an altitude of 13,000 feet.
I ate it. It was fine, but I wondered who else would appreciate such an esoteric treat.
“French people,” said Nasu. “We get written up in a lot of fashion magazines. I don’t know why.”
I thought the Chinese food of Tokyo was less bound by rituals and traditions than the French or Italian, and I could only guess at the explanation: more familiarity, less awe. The Japanese chefs concentrating on Chinese food seem entirely comfortable with their responsibilities, less restrained than they would have been if they were preparing Japanese food.
Chef-owner Takeshi Kobayashi of the Chinese restaurant Momo-No-Ki, which features Hong Kong (Cantonese) and Shanghai (eastern regional) cuisine, told me that when he started out, he dreamed of being a French chef with a toque “because I thought those guys were so cool.” Then he became smitten with the variety, the techniques, and the regional differences of Chinese. “I did not want to do Japanese food, which is beautiful and tastes good, but there is a way to do everything, all predetermined, and you have to play by the rules,” he said. “There is space in Chinese cuisine to show yourself. The heat is strong, and the food can change drastically, so the personality of the chef comes through.”
Momo-No-Ki
Momo-No-Ki, like most of the restaurants I visited, is simple in design. And like most others, it boasts an open kitchen, which is highly unusual in a Chinese restaurant, where one tends not to want to observe too many details of how food is prepared. The room has blond chairs, framed calligraphy, odd wall scribblings, and exceptionally unattractive plastic tablecloths. Dangling from hooks at the perimeter of the kitchen were house-cured unsmoked bacon and a fuzzy foodstuff that resembled the stuffing from an old couch but turned out to be the dried skin of an obscure (and apparently very large) citrus fruit.
Momo-No-Ki
Service was kind, although overly efficient. The cold chicken in black vinegar, very Shanghai, was on the table before my guest and I had ordered our entire meal. To be fair to the restaurant, it did take us a while to decipher the menu.
Kobayashi says most Tokyo chefs with Chinese restaurants tone down flavors, since the Japanese palate is used to subtlety. He deliberately does not. He piles on coriander, an herb he says is too aggressive for most Japanese. The chicken was vibrant and the black-vinegar sauce sublime. He’s skilled at sauces, not ordinarily a virtue of Chinese kitchens, and I don’t doubt he would have made a fabulous saucier, had he stuck to his original plan of becoming a French chef.
His soup dumplings, a Shanghai staple, had fantastically delicate wrappers, and his pork dumplings were perhaps more subdued and Japanese than he realized. His sweet-and-sour pork was wondrous, unlike any I’d ever had. The chunk of soft braised meat came with a coating so caramelized it was nearly black.
Momo-No-Ki's pork dumplings in soup
Leaving his restaurant, Pratt and I stumbled over one of the iconic images of Tokyo. There are quite a few, including the gaudy lights of the Roppongi entertainment district and the snowcapped symmetry of Mount Fuji. Another is the moaning Japanese patron, polluted with alcohol. Crouched on the steps leading up to the door of Momo-No-Ki, where a sign reads chinese cuisine for your good health, was a drunk Japanese businessman, suit jacket missing, forehead shining, head in hands, groaning pitiably.
He was not a victim of the food but of the legendary Japanese inability to process alcohol as rapidly as legendary Japanese businessmen like to drink alcohol. I have always wondered why they don’t slow down, and I heard one plausible explanation: Only when low-level businessmen are drunk are they permitted to tell off their high-level bosses; it is inexcusable when sober.
We did not stop to help. That would have been wrong. We stepped around him, as is right and proper, for in Japan, that which one pretends not to see can be said not to exist.
*****
dining multiculturalism in Japan almost certainly started at Shiseido Parlour, in the Ginza district. The menu features standards that few fine American restaurants bother with any longer: beef Stroganoff, meat and seafood croquettes, and fried sole, to name a few. Long before the invasion of celebrity chefs from France, Italy, and America, Arinobu Fukuhara, a former head pharmacist to the Imperial Japanese Navy, visited the United States and Europe and devised a thrilling concept that was unveiled in 1902. It soon became fashionable.
But let my awed waiter at Shiseido Parlour tell you about it: “He combined a pharmacy and a café!”
This gentleman stared at me, expecting my eyes to glow. I didn’t want to break his heart by telling him that the idea was stolen from America, where every town boasted a combination drugstore–soda shop until chain pharmacies drove them out of business. The Tokyo soda fountain evolved into a restaurant of consummate elegance, located in the Shiseido Building and operated by one of the oldest cosmetics companies in the world. The cuisine is yoshoku—Western food.
The room appears very Park Avenue, mostly shades of yellow and gold. The flatware is Christofle. The white tablecloths are embossed. The space between tables is luxurious. The staff could not be more polite or solicitous. A woman I brought to dinner told me that people of a certain class always courted in the Ginza district, and that Shiseido Parlour is where such couples brought their parents. To the Japanese, oddly enough, Shiseido Parlour is a place of memory. To me, the soothing familiarity of the room alone made it was worth a visit.
I had a clear broth packed with wild mushrooms and perked up with bits of home-cured ham. It was American comfort food without being American at all. The ham croquettes—very Midwest—were fat and puffy and came in a smooth sauce that reminded me of Campbell’s tomato soup. A slow-cooked rice-and-beef assemblage called “hashed beef and rice” said 1950. The butter cookies couldn’t be beat.
Desserts at Shiseido Parlour: a macaroon (above) and gâteau aux fraises (below)
The food is expensive—about $45 for fresh prawns with tartar sauce—but a luncheon menu available for under $40 includes many of the famous preparations and should not be missed. I learned that with care, it is possible to eat at least as well in Tokyo as I do in New York for about the same price. The style just happens to be different: Manhattan has moved toward high-concept, corporate-run, over-ornamented behemoths. Tokyo has small, austere, chef-owned establishments.
We hear from Manhattan chefs that small, precious, jewel-box restaurants can no longer survive because of the rising costs of rent. Tokyo, I believe, is at least Manhattan’s equal in cost of living, yet many of the best restaurants I visited were precisely in this style—intimate and operated by a chef who seldom leaves his kitchen and certainly has no consulting businesses or lines of cookware on the side. Clearly, Japanese and American chefs define ambition in different ways.
You might also have heard that the products in Tokyo are exquisite and pricey. It’s certainly true in the fabled specialty-food shops, where I saw muskmelons—as best I can tell, they’re given as presents to elderly relatives in hospitals—going for up to $150 apiece. The price of apples and grapes scared me, too. Yet in restaurants, I found truffles treated like an everyday condiment, and the beef on fixed-price menus was invariably Wagyu, without supplemental charge. In Tokyo, such extravagances are thought of as an essential aspect of cuisine, not an alternative means of raising cash.
Without question, all the chefs I met were modest, as I had been led to believe they would be. Kishida, who became an instant icon after Quintessence received three stars from Michelin, clearly improvises. Some of his food was deconstructed. Most appetizers were oddly monochromatic—the extreme simplicity of his decor echoed in the appearance of the food. Some was foamed. Much was whimsical. Yet when I suggested to him that his style was a redefinition of the classical, certainly in presentation, he looked at me as though it were an accusation and replied, politely, “No, no, very natural—simple and natural.” Humility prevailed wherever I went.
Tokyo chefs are clearly more cautious than those in America or Europe, both with their words and with their cooking, but by no means are they constrained. Often they tweak classic recipes to suit the local palate or to incorporate seasonal products. Sometimes—cured pork with melon sorbet is an example—they actually seem capable of having fun.
Tokyo brought back memories of a time when America was just beginning to understand that cuisines of other countries could be absorbed, then suitably modified. In the ’80s and ’90s, America expressed itself with exuberance. Tokyo today is about generosity and excellence. The city is impenetrable and daunting, but the restaurants are familiar and down-to-earth.
FIVE DISHES NOT TO MISS
Uniin cold consommé with cauliflower cream
Kitajimatei
Faultless sea urchin, as you’d expect in Japan, in a cold, clear chicken broth garnished with a cream so light I barely knew it was there. So elegant, so exquisitely Japanese-French.
Chicken-liver crostini
Ristorante Terauchi
It’s more than just liver on toast; it’s the fundamental start to every Tuscan meal. This version tasted as though the chef had slipped in another kind of liver—foie gras. Chicken liver never tasted so good in Italy.
Sweet-and-sour pork
Momo-no-ki
During the first third of my life, syrupy, goopy American-style sweet-and-sour pork was my favorite restaurant dish. Momo-No-Ki’s vastly superior version is caramelized rather than sugarcoated and more tart (from black vinegar) than sweet. If you like braised meats, you’ll love this.
Fillet of smoked salmon topped with frizzled potatoes
Kinoshita
How can a slab of fish so thick and so smoky vanish in the mouth as though it were nothing but air? Crisp on the outside, juicy within, and resting in a lemon-cream sauce.
Fatty Tuna
Sushi Dai, Tsukiji Fish Market
I didn’t go to Tokyo to eat Japanese food, but isn’t sushi really considered California cuisine these days? There’s always a line and sometimes a wait of a few hours, but you can’t beat the quality or the price (thirteen pieces plus miso soup for $35).
From the March 2008 issue of GQ.
Photographs by Ditte Isager
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