Rice, Noodle, Fish (13 page)

(Michael Magers, lead photographer)

Forger
|
鍛冶

(Michael Magers, lead photographer)

Sharpener
|
刃付

(Michael Magers, lead photographer)

Honer
|
刃付

(Michael Magers, lead photographer)

Setter
|
問屋

(Michael Magers, lead photographer)

In a culture with knives for every micro task,
santoku
is the closest thing to an all-purpose chef's knife.
San
= “three” and
toku
= “virtue” or “character.” The three virtues are meat, fish, and vegetables.

Sakai blades are made by forging together soft ferrite and high-carbon steel at 1,000˚C, a delicate process that few blacksmiths have mastered, and can fetch up to $3,000 per knife.

The edge first takes shape on a sharpening stone made from whale bones. The exact angle depends on what the blade will be used for: there are configurations for everything from root vegetables to octopus.

A wealthy port town, Sakai was once home to Japan's finest sword makers. Today a small group of dedicated
shokunin
continue the tradition by making the most coveted knives in the culinary world.

 

 

If you blink, you might miss it. You might miss the wet floor at the threshold, symbolically cleansing you before the meal begins. You might overlook the flower arrangement in the corner, a spare expression of the passing season. You might miss the scroll on the wall drawn with a single unbroken line, signaling the infinite continuity of nature. You might not detect the gentle current of young ginger rippling through the dashi, the extra sheet of Hokkaido kelp in the soup, the mochi that is made to look like a cherry blossom at midnight.

You might miss the water.

“I believe water is the most important ingredient in Japanese cuisine,” says Toshiro Ogata, chef of the eponymous two-star kaiseki restaurant in the heart of Kyoto. “I always think about different ways to showcase water.”

It paints an extraordinary picture, a chef kept awake at night by the most common substance on earth, an ingredient distinguished mainly by its absence of flavor. It would be easy to dismiss as precious lip service, an affectation delivered by a man expected to obsess over the details everyone else overlooks, if not for the fact that every week he drives into the mountains outside Kyoto and comes back with the best water nature provides.

If that's not proof enough of his obsession, there are the first three courses he serves me: a bowl of rice from Niigata Prefecture, steamed seconds before I sit down, shiny with a sheen of warm starch, presented with nothing more than a pod of lightly grilled fava beans;
ichiban
dashi, a stock of seaweed and dried tuna, twenty minutes old, served in an ink-black lacquer bowl; and finally, that same infant dashi, the same inky lacquer, this time with a pearl-white cross section of simmered onion floating in the center, a world of texture in its rings.

As I sip from the bowl cradled in my palms, I watch the line of liquid vanish against the shiny black surface—a moment of peace and mystery. Three courses, three expressions of water, collectively the most audacious and confounding start to any meal I've ever eaten.

Ogata-san is forty-seven years old, but cooks and speaks with a wisdom that suggests he's been on this rock for a few extra orbits. With each new course, he offers up little bites of the ethos that drives his cooking, the tastes and the words playing off each other like a kaiseki echo chamber.

Ark shell, a bulging, bright orange clam peeking out of its dark shell, barely cooked, dusted with seaweed salt.

“To add things is easy; to take them away is the challenge.”

Bamboo, cut into wedges, boiled in mountain water and served in a wide, shallow bowl with nothing but the cooking liquid.

“How can we make the ingredient taste more like itself? With heat, with water, with knifework.”

Tempura: a single large clam, cloaked in a pale, soft batter with more chew than crunch. The clam snaps under gentle pressure, releasing a warm ocean of umami.

“I want to send a message to the guest: this is the best possible way to cook this ingredient.”

A meaty fillet of eel wrapped around a thumb of burdock root, glazed with
soy and mirin, grilled until crispy: a three-bite explosion that leaves you desperate for more.

“The meal must go up and down, following strong flavors with subtle flavors, setting the right tone for the diner.”

And it does, rising and falling, ebbing and flowing, until the last frothy drop of matcha is gone, signaling the end of the meal. Ten dishes, thirty ingredients, the breadth of kaiseki: boiled, raw, steamed, fried, grilled, all served in their proper order, all part of a poem Ogata pens to this city and to this season. A beautiful piece that I'm not sure I fully understand.

There is no questioning the quality of his ingredients, the scope of his skill, the depth of his dedication, but this is a cuisine so minimalist that it sometimes seems to not exist at all. “Western food is about addition,” says Ogata. “Japanese food is about subtraction.”

The wet stone, the lonely scroll, the midnight mochi: these are the tiny details that make kaiseki Japan's most elegant and extraordinary and befuddling branch of cuisine. Beautiful and austere, ancient and earnest, never has a cuisine better matched a city. And never has there been a city as mystifying as Kyoto.

米 麺 魚

Over 30 million people a year come to soak up the Kyoto experience, to visit the more than two thousand temples, marvel at the Zen restraint of hundreds of rock gardens, lose themselves in the shadows of towering bamboo forests. UNESCO must appropriate a budget solely for lavishing Kyoto with awards and designations, because over the years the UN has blessed seventeen buildings with its coveted heritage award. Add in the creaky teahouses, the tiny, mystery-filled streets of the Gion, the kimono-clad women, the sword-making men, and you see why Kyoto is considered the cultural heart of Japan, what Pico Iyer, the British essayist who came to the city in 1992 and never left, calls “a citywide shrine to Japaneseness.”

Ogata's boiled bamboo in bamboo broth

(Matt Goulding)

No shrine to Japaneseness would be complete without its own dedicated cuisine, and
kyo-ryori
, the food of Kyoto, proves to be every bit as decorated as the rest of the city's disciplines. Kyoto claims seven restaurants with three Michelin stars and another twenty-two with two stars making it the most Michelin-dense city on the planet. If the Michelin man doesn't impress you, consider this: in November 2013 Kyoto led a successful campaign to have Japanese cuisine enshrined with a UNESCO Cultural Heritage award, one of only a handful of cuisines in the world to be honored with the distinction.

When I first came to Kyoto, it wasn't for gardens or geisha or UNESCO-blessed shrines; it was for kaiseki. For years I had marveled at it from afar, studied the format and history, read about the quiet practitioners turning dining into an all-encompassing feast for the senses. I had seen its fingerprints all over fine dining in the rest of the world—from the mixture of minimalism and naturalism that defines modern haute cuisine to the entire concept of an interconnected tasting menu designed to tell a story larger than the sum of its tastes.

It was the fall, a beautiful time for eating in Japan, when wild mushrooms cover the forest floors and tiny sweet fish swim upstream. In four days I ate five kaiseki meals, a procession of lunches and dinners made with the best imaginable ingredients handled with tremendous precision and served in exquisite settings. There were moments of striking beauty and astounding taste, but those were ultimately overshadowed by the confusion, consternation, and, worst of all, boredom I often felt in these restaurants. Every meal contained the same plate of sashimi, the same vegetable tempura, the same stilted, slightly tense service. I began to feel that kaiseki was a movie whose plot I already knew. In five meals I had five
dobin mushi
, a teakettle filled with conger eel and matsutake mushroom stems, along
with a fragrant strip of
sudachi
lime zest, meant to be drunk first, then eaten. The first time, it was an eyes-in-the-back-of-the-head revelation; the fifth time, it felt soulless.

By the time I boarded the Shinkansen back to Tokyo—wallet empty, belly full of mushroom tea—I felt as if I might never need to eat another kaiseki meal in my life.

Was I missing something? Was I bringing my own baggage to the dinner table, hampered by being a foreigner, or did other Japanese find kaiseki so inaccessible? Was a chef who built a menu around water totally fucking insane, or was I the crazy one? The more I thought about it, the more I came to feel for kaiseki the same way I felt for Kyoto: breathtakingly beautiful but encased in amber, more a fossil than a living, breathing creature.

I took my concerns to the people who knew best, the serious eaters of Japan, speaking with friends in Kyoto, Tokyo, and other parts of the country to get their read on kaiseki. I quickly learned that kaiseki is like a Rorschach test for foodies: some see the epitome of elegance and refinement; others see a boring, overpriced cuisine in need of a shake-up. A small group of dedicated chowhounds I consulted spoke reverentially of the importance of kaiseki, its history and impact on Japan, not unlike the way certain Americans discuss the importance of, say, the Constitution. The other, much larger group all offered variations on the same theme: kaiseki is for old, rich people.

I found myself stranded on an island in between, respectful of its beauty and refinement but wary of its rigidity. I continued to feel this way about Kyoto and its famous cuisine until, one day in the fall of 2013, I met Ken Yokoyama, and everything I thought I knew was turned upside down.

米 麺 魚

Whatever you need, Ken Yokoyama has you covered. Need tickets to that
Kabuki show that sold out weeks ago? He knows a guy. Want to eat in that tiny Michelin-starred restaurant all your food-obsessed friends talk about? He'll make a call. Hoping to catch a glimpse of that austere rock garden without all the camera-clutching tourists? He'll do his best, which is always more than enough.

In a city where most doors are locked, Ken carries a skeleton key. As the general manager of the Hyatt Regency Kyoto, it's his job to open doors, but he does so with a subtlety and humility that belie his position. I first meet Ken as a guest of the hotel, which I choose based solely on his reputation, which has spread to certain corners of the country. The accolades, if anything, prove to be understated.

Every morning when I see Ken working the breakfast crowd, I think of the scene in
Casino
in which Robert De Niro is meeting with an exec in the hotel restaurant and both are eating blueberry muffins, only his partner's is exploding with fruit, and De Niro's has only one or two sad little blueberries. So he marches back to the kitchen and tells the dumbfounded chef that he wants every last muffin to have the same amount of blueberries.
The same amount of blueberries.
That's Ken, only not just with muffins, with everything: the petals on the flower arrangements that decorate the lobby, the warm sesame tofu served in the
robata-ya
downstairs, the hand-signed welcome note waiting on your pillow.

The Hyatt was once the indisputable hotel king of Kyoto, “the only non-
ryokan
game in town,” as a travel agent friend told me when I first visited. But in late 2013 the Ritz-Carlton set up shop across the Kamo River, opening an aggressively gorgeous hotel rumored to cost $300 million to build. They poached a few of Ken's lieutenants and no doubt went after Ken himself (even if Ken won't admit it), but he seems unfazed. If anything, it makes Yokoyama-san push even harder.

I first recognize the full scope of Ken's reach one fall afternoon a day after we meet. Over a cup of coffee we talk kaiseki, and Ken gently probes the depth of my understanding. Between business dinners, government meetings, and VIP guest treatment, Ken eats kaiseki twice a week, as much as any man in this city, and he brings an anthropologist's eye to the discipline.

After offering up a few quick history lessons, he asks me where I intend to eat. I tell him that Sojiki Nakahigashi, an intimate, modern kaiseki considered Kyoto's most difficult reservation, is at the top of my wish list. “Yes, that would be at the top of my list, too, but as you know, it's not easy even for locals to get in.” A few hours after our talk, my phone rings; it's Ken. “Nakahigashi-san will met you tomorrow at five p.m. for a chat. Then at six p.m. he will cook you dinner.”