Rice, Noodle, Fish (15 page)

The father lays down a gorgeous ceramic plate with a poem painted on its surface. “From the sixteenth century,” he tells us, then goes about constructing the dish with his son, piece by piece: First, a chunk of tilefish wrapped around a grilled matsutake mushroom stem. Then a thick triangle of grilled mushroom cap, plus another grilled stem the size of a D-sized battery, topped with mushroom miso. A pickled ginger shoot, a few tender soybeans, and the crowning touch, the tilefish skin, separated from its body and fried into a rippled wave of crunch.

The rice course arrives in a small bamboo steamer. The young chef works quickly. He slices curtains of tuna belly from a massive, fat-streaked block, dips it briefly in house-made soy sauce, then lays it on the rice. Over the top he spoons a sauce of seaweed and crushed sesame seeds just as the tuna fat begins to melt into the grains below.

A round of tempura comes next: a harvest moon of creamy pumpkin, a gold nugget of blowfish capped with a translucent daikon sauce, and finally a soft, custardy chunk of salmon liver, intensely fatty with a bitter edge, a flavor that I've never tasted before.

The last savory course comes in a large ice block carved into the shape of a bowl. Inside, a nest of soba noodles tinted green with powdered matcha floating in a dashi charged with citrus and topped with a false quail egg, the
white fashioned from grated daikon. The chefs cheer as I lift the block to my lips.

It happens fast, ten courses in just over an hour, and it unspools so quickly that there's no time for talking or processing everything they serve us, but by the time we emerge from the restaurant under a bright bank of Kansai stars, I know that I've just eaten one of the great meals of my life.

米 麺 魚

If anyone could be expected to carry the torch for classic Kyoto cuisine, it's Shunichi Matsuno. He was born in Gion, the ancient geisha district of Kyoto and the spiritual center of kaiseki. His dad ran a private teahouse, one of the most exclusive institutions in a city built on exclusive institutions. Down the street, one aunt owned a famous soba shop and another a grilled eel restaurant, two sturdy pillars of
kyo-ryori
.

And yet, when he graduated from university, Shunichi wanted to be a salaryman—a wage warrior far away from the smoke and steam of the kitchen. But the cooking gene was strong in Shunichi, and when the business suit began to chafe, he decided to continue the family legacy, albeit with his own restaurant safely removed from the rest of the Matsuno clan.

“The Gion was filled with drunk people treating women badly. Lots of prostitution. I knew I needed to get away from the center of Kyoto.” So he came to Arashiyama, six miles due west, and bought a house along the Oi River with a sweeping view of the area's guidebook beauty.

“Being next to the river and the mountains, we hear the water from the kitchen, we see the leaves change from our window.”

Tempura Matsu was a true tempura restaurant for only three years. The fry business was slow, so Shunichi began to experiment with other dishes to serve alongside the tempura. It was those dishes that customers loved and came back for. Gradually the menu
grew in scope and ambition, incorporating the structure of traditional kaiseki but without being bound to its strict tenets.

He ran the restaurant with his wife, Toyomi, and when his daughter, Mariko, and his son, Toshio, were born, as is tradition in Japan, they eventually became a part of the business.

I learn all this one morning in the back of Shunichi's station wagon on the way to Kyoto's central market. Toshio is riding shotgun, arguing with his dad over the quickest backstreets to take through the city. It's been nine months since the midnight meal with Ken at the Matsu counter, and barely a day has passed when I haven't thought about that crunchy tilefish skin, that miso lobster, that icy soba finale. After nearly a dozen kaiseki meals and a world of ambivalence, I felt like I finally had a breakthrough, something unequivocally worthy of the towering fame of Kyoto's cuisine, and I needed to know—and taste—more.

The benchmark for innovation in Western cuisine is high these days. Ever since Ferran and Albert Adrià of Spain's El Bulli blew the doors off the traditional French model of dining that dominated high-end restaurants for decades, unleashing on the world a palette of foams, gels, powders, and spheres to paint with, the modern kitchen has become the seat of a creative arms race. Centrifuges and thermal circulators share counter space with mortars and pestles, young chefs use liquid nitrogen like old chefs use freezers, and restaurants collaborate with physicists, chemists, even perfumists, in the search for the next big discovery. Ambition announces itself with a megaphone at these places, above all on the plate, where a tableau of strange tastes and textures paint precious—and sometimes delicious—pictures.

But in Japan, creativity takes a back seat to tradition. Chefs remain more dedicated to perfecting the old than uncovering the new. Here innovation means adding a few extra grams of
katsuobushi
to your dashi, buying your tuna on Tuesday and serving it on Thursday, driving to the mountain to get your water. By this measure, what I tasted at Tempura Matsu was radical, if not downright heretical.

Shunichi and Toshio Matsuno, in the kitchen at Tempura Matsu

(Michael Magers, lead photographer)

Most visitors to Kyoto will wind up in the Nishiki Market, the spellbinding sprawl of pickle purveyors, tofu artisans, and prepared-food specialists that runs horizontally through five blocks of downtown. But Kyoto's legions of chefs do most of their shopping at the less beautiful but more functional wholesale market, a cavernous collection of bulk seafood, meat, and vegetable dealers. As with most of Japan's commercial markets, you need a special ID just to survey the goods.

The menu at Tempura Matsu is a constantly evolving animal, with dishes rotating on and off daily, if not hourly. Every night after service, Toshio and Shunichi draw up the next day's menu, but final decisions aren't made until they've done their market run and tasted as many of the menu's protagonists as possible. “Too many chefs in Kyoto cook by the calendar, not by taste,” says Shunichi. “We would never write a monthly menu because if the product isn't good, you still have to use it, and that doesn't make sense.”

Instead, the two of them bound from one stand to the next, tasting everything in their path, making adjustments as they go. Shunichi is a large man, half bald, with a light frost of white stubble and a round face that looks borrowed from a manga character. His default facial expression is a smile that could melt an ice bowl of soba, punctuated by the occasional furrowed brow reserved for contemplative moments. Dressed in sweatpants, a bubbly jacket vest, and long-sleeved black shirt, he could be an emcee a few rhymes past his prime.

The shopping starts with Shunichi's tuna man. When the fishmonger sees us coming, he pulls out a large katana blade and saws thin slices of meat off the tail,
which he dresses with soy and passes our way. “These ones don't have a lot of fat because they're jumping so much right now,” says Shunichi. “They swim around the world to get away from their wives, and then they end up in my kitchen. Ha! Ha! Ha!”

He tells the man to bring out the
otoro
, the prized belly meat, which next to the lean tail meat looks like a winter snowstorm. Shunichi, convinced, peels off 10,000-yen notes from a thick wad he carries in his sweatpants.

We stop at a sea urchin vendor a few stands down who lines up a selection of Hokkaido and Kansai
uni
for us to taste. “You see? The Kansai
uni
isn't sweet enough yet,” Dad says to his son. “We'll use it mostly later in the season, when it improves, but for now we'll stick with Hokkaido.”

As we move through the market, gathering the building blocks for today's menu, Shunichi offers a running commentary on everything we pass. “See these eels? They're caught one by one in a net. The difference in taste is unbelievable. . . . Hokkaido asparagus is famous, but these are too fat to be delicious. . . . You know what these are? Dried sea cucumber ovaries. The most expensive ingredient in the world.”

Purveyors offer us tea, ply us with samples, pull Shunichi aside to show him a special product they've saved just for him. He happily bellows out his opinions on any and all market constituents, including the vendors themselves, but when it comes time to discuss prices, he goes quiet. He'll grab a vendor by the arm, usher him to the side and whisper, often using a little piece of cardboard to cover his mouth so others can't read his lips.

He takes an enormous amount of pride in the product he procures and the prices he pays, a result, he says, of the relationships he's cultivated over four decades at the market and the fact that he always carries cash. “A meal that could cost forty thousand yen anywhere else in Kyoto costs only fifteen thousand at our place. I know how to get value.”

But while purveyors all vie for his attention, not everyone loves his bargaining tactics. “They call my dad the little devil in this market,” says Toshio. He leans in to add, “Sometimes I think the same thing.”

“What did you say?” Shunichi asks, inspecting a large snapping turtle crawling across the market floor.

“Nothing, Dad,” he says, shooting me a little wink. “How does the turtle look?”

“Delicious.” After a bit of negotiating, he settles on a 3.7-kilogram turtle, not something on the shopping list today, but he likes the rim of yellow fat he spots beneath the shell.

After a breakfast of ramen and fried rice, we make the morning's last purchase just outside the market maze. Shunichi has arranged to meet one of Kyoto's top sushi chefs, who moonlights as a high-end wild boar dealer. The chef emerges from between two delivery trucks with a white plastic bag in his hand and quickly passes it off to Shunichi, as if it were a brick of Colombia's finest.

“Three-year-old virgin boars are the most delicious,” he says, peeking into the bag. “The fat is perfect.”

It's late April in Kyoto, not long after the last of the cherry blossoms have vanished, which means
takenoko
(bamboo) season is in full bloom. Seasonality is a dominant tenet of Japanese cooking across the country, but in Kyoto, it dictates nearly every calorie consumed across the city. At this very moment, a thousand prep chefs are peeling back the fibrous layers of bamboo bulbs.

The Matsunos buy their bamboo from Yoshiaki Yamashita, a farmer whose family has been farming bamboo on the outskirts of Arashiyama for centuries. “He's Japan's number one bamboo farmer. He's the emperor's
takenoko
supplier. Very high-class stuff.”

The key to great bamboo, Yamashita tells me, is space. Bamboo trees can reproduce for six years, but their roots need room to spread, and the sun needs
room to bake the forest floor. More than a farmer, Yamashita is a constant gardener, pruning branches, keeping the trees to a height of six meters, using rice husk to sow nutrients back into the soil.

The best bamboo is found deep underground, safely away from sunlight, turning the harvest into something resembling a truffle hunt. We walk carefully and quietly through the forest, looking for little cracks in the earth that indicate a baby bamboo trying to make its way to the surface. When we spot cracks, Yamashita comes by with a small pick and gently works the soil until he reaches the bulb.

Most bamboo you see is ruddy brown or purple, but Yamashita's
takenoko
comes out lily white, tender, and sweet enough to eat like an apple.

“You have to cook it right away, otherwise you begin to lose the flavor,” says Shunichi. He pulls his cell phone from his sweatpants and calls the restaurant.

“Tell them to start boiling the water. We're coming back.”

米 麺 魚

For a place filled with so many outsiders, Kyoto is the ultimate insider's town. Everywhere you turn you find reminders of the line that exists between you and them: not just the restaurant menus dense with Japan's three alphabets, but the hidden pathways, the dancing curtains, the portals to a world that your imagination will work fiercely to construct as you wander through the shadows of Kyoto's oldest streets.

To understand just how deep the divide runs, consider the case of Ken. He is the ultimate insider, as deeply connected to this city, its culture, and its most august citizens as anyone you'll meet, yet he will never be anything but a guest in this city, a Yokohama-born transplant with Kyoto in his heart but not in his blood. Even if he had been born here, it would make no difference; Kyotoites count their history not in years or decades but in centuries.

Robert Yellin, an American expat who runs one of Kyoto's greatest ceramics galleries, tells it like this: “You aren't officially a Kyotoite until you're seventh generation. If you're sixth generation and your family has been here for two hundred years, you're still an outsider.”