Rice, Noodle, Fish (17 page)

From a strict skills standpoint, Toshio is more than ready to blaze his own trail. I've seen few chefs with his touch, his versatility, his innate ability to create delicious, meaningful food. But this is his father's kitchen, his father's meticulous creation. Shunichi spent a lifetime ignoring the rules of Kyoto to build a bridge to the future, and now his son fears that he might have to cross it alone.

米 麺 魚

One morning I rent a bike and ride west, away from the old city. I ride with a backpack full of salty snacks and green tea, the Golden Pavilion of Kinkaku-ji my nominal destination. I don't pedal for long before discovering that most of this city lives and breathes in the vast space between Karasuma Station and Arashiyama, shopping for flat-screens, drinking canned coffee from vending machines, catching buses and trains like the rest of Japan.

Halfway to the pavilion, I hit a red light on a busy street corner. While I wait, life passes me by: cars honk, schoolgirls in plaid skirts eat French fries from a takeaway bag, a man passes out flyers for a cell phone sale down the street. For three light cycles, I just stand there, eyes glazed, wondering what to make of this strange city before me.

It's not the Kyoto we come for, and if you want your vision of this city to be as unblemished as the Gion's baby-smooth streets, it's best to stay east of the Kamo
River. Most visitors—gaijin and Japanese alike—would rather not spoil the view, but head west on foot or by bike or taxi and you will see the “other” Kyoto, a Kyoto without brooding red bulbs, rake-groomed gardens, powder-white layers of face paint.

This is a Kyoto that feeds itself the same way most of Japan feeds itself: with big steamy bowls of shoyu ramen, grilled skewers of chicken hearts, egg salad sandwiches from Lawson. For this Kyoto, traditional kaiseki is a source of pride, not a source of sustenance.

If places like Kikunoi and Ogata exist to nourish Old Kyoto (and the affluent visitors who come to immerse themselves in its unflinching antiquity), GiroGiro represents the tastes of a more modern city—young, hip, more concerned about value and good times than adherence to historical standards.

GiroGiro is a kaiseki restaurant, but only in the most liberal definition of the term. It's true, the third course they serve is sashimi, the sixth tempura, the last rice and miso soup, all in accordance with kaiseki code, but the similarities between it and the earnest institutions that have turned Kyoto into the Milky Way of Michelin stars stop there. The list of differences runs long.

To start with, there's the noise. Conversations echo off the ceilings, laughter bounces off the walls, the collective commotion a stark contrast to the pin-drop silence observed at most kaiseki restaurants.

The cooks: bright shocks of spiky hair, tattoos, loud and animated and quite possibly drunk—literally the polar opposite of almost every other cook you'll see in Japan.

The crowd looks scarcely different from the cooks: young, nicely toasted, aggressively hip. There seems to be more facial hair in this one room than in the rest of the country combined.

The price: at 3,500 yen, dinner at GiroGiro costs roughly one-tenth what you might pay at top-tier kaiseki in Kyoto, opening up the reservation book
to an entirely different set of demographics.

If Nakahigashi is classical and Tempura Matsu jazz, this is punk rock kaiseki, done with attitude, volume, and a disdain for rules and expectations. There will be no scrolls to consider, no flower arrangements to admire, no ancient pottery to appreciate. As for the food, well, it's more manipulated, more dressed up, than anything you'd find in traditional kaiseki.

“In many ways, the more expensive the food, the more simple it's going to be, and that's hard to get as a beginner,” says Shota Okuda, who has been cooking at GiroGiro for six years. “We have to develop techniques to work with the ingredients we can afford.” Many of the resulting creations display a generous vision and a deft touch, like a bowl of rice spiked with sesame seeds and daikon, pressed fish roe and fresh strawberries, a tightrope balance of sweet and savory. Or the crispy fish cake covered in a sauce of whipped tofu and juicy segments of grapefruit—a dish with the type of contrasting tastes and textures you wish more kaiseki chefs would employ.

Other times, the limitations of a $35 kaiseki dinner are more noticeable. The final course of steamed rice and grilled
anago
, served with mushy, flaccid eel, made me long for the crispy soy-shellacked
anago
at Ogata.

But nobody here seems to mind. Young couples hold hands under the countertop. An apple-cheeked diner plies the staff with shots of whisky. A waitress, victim of the patron's generosity, stumbles delivering desserts to the last customers.

“Kyoto is ultimately a very young town,” says Okuda, “and the university students can't go to traditional kaiseki, but they can come here with a date.”

GiroGiro isn't the only restaurant pushing the kaiseki envelope. Jimbocho Den takes the traditional format and infuses it with whimsy and wizardry, serving dishes like Wagyu stained with beet blood and Dentucky Fried Chicken
in a mock KFC box. At Ryugin, chef Seiji Yamamoto combines a
shokunin
's ingredient obsession with highfalutin techniques borrowed from modernist kitchens in the West. Both are exceptional places to eat, but both are in Tokyo, far from the standards and strictures of Kyoto.

Compared to these, GiroGiro, with its wobbling waitresses and Sid Vicious line cooks, is an especially aggressive addition to the kaiseki canon. Perhaps the most audacious part of GiroGiro is its location, along the Shirakawa Canal, a few blocks from the Gion, one of the oldest and loveliest parts of Kyoto. The past literally pushing up against the future, the conundrum of kaiseki, of Kyoto, and in many ways of all of Japan, captured in a single restaurant with a funny name.

Is this the future of kaiseki? Half of Kyoto shudders at the thought. The other half is lining up for a reservation.

米 麺 魚

As the last of the lunch customers make their way out the door, Matsuno-san seats me at the counter and says something in Japanese to his son that could mean only one thing: keep it coming.

First, a sizzling stone, the same one Toshio introduced to Ducasse years back. Today it's filled with rice and ginger juice and baby firefly squid, which crackle wildly as he tosses it all like a scalding salad and pushes it over to me. The squid guts coat the rice like an ocean risotto, give it body and funk, while the heat from the stone crisps the grains like a perfect bibimbap.

By now the other cooks have all stopped working; even Shunichi has stepped out of the kitchen to talk with his wife. It's just Toshio, and you can tell by the way he wriggles his shoulders and glides between stations that he lives for this moment.

Next comes
chawan mushi
, a delicate egg custard studded with wild mountain vegetables and surrounded by flowers from the bamboo forest. A dish as old as Kyoto itself.

Toshio creates a new dish while his father looks on.

(Matt Goulding)

Toshio plucks two sacs of cod milt from the grill, slides them off the skewer into a squat clay box filled with bubbling miso. He comes back a second later with a scoop of
konawata
, pickled sea cucumber organs. A dish as new as the spring flowers blooming just outside the window.

One by one, the market stars reappear on the plate.

A black-and-gold-lacquered bowl: Toshio pulls off the top to reveal thin slices of three-year-old virgin wild boar braised into sweet, savory submission with Kyoto white miso and chunks of root vegetables.

Uni
—Hokkaido and Kansai—the first atop a wedge of taro root dusted with rice flour and lightly fried, the other resting gently on a fried shiso leaf. Two bites, two urchins, an echo of the lesson in the market this morning.

Shunichi comes back to the kitchen and shuffles up behind his son, watching his moves closely.

He's on to sashimi now, fanning and curling slices of snapper and fugu into white roses on his cutting board. Before Toshio can plate the slices, Shunichi reaches over and calmly replaces the serving plate his son has chosen with an Edo-era ceramic rectangle more to his liking.

Three pieces of tempura—shrimp, eggplant, new onion—emerge hissing and golden from the black iron pot in the corner, and Toshio arranges them on small plates with wedges of Japanese lime. Before the tempura goes out, Shunichi sneaks in a few extra granules of salt while Toshio's not looking.

By now Dad is shadowing his son's every move. As Toshio waves a thin plank of sea cucumber eggs over the charcoal fire, his dad leans gently over his shoulder. “Be careful. You don't want to cook it. You just want to release its aroma.”

Toshio places a fried silverfish spine on a craggy ceramic plate, tucks grated yuzu and
sansho
flowers into its ribs, then lays a sliver of the dried eggs over
the top. The bones shatter like a potato chip, and the sea cucumber detonates in my mouth.

A golden light bleeds through the window, framing the spirals of steam rising from a copper teakettle. Outside, the river sparkles at the foot of the mountains. At this hour, Tempura Matsu looks magnificent.

It's way past lunchtime. Normally the entire family would be upstairs, eating lunch together, a moment of peace, the day's first, before the dinner rush. But not today.

Toshio uses tongs to pluck a burning log of
binchotan
charcoal from the fire, sets it on an inverted Japanese roof tile filled with sand, and places it all before me. “This is an idea I just came up with,” he says with a mischievous little smile.

He pinches two slices of densely marbled Japanese beef between chopsticks and lays them directly over the
binchotan
, a cloud of smoke rising on contact.

Shunichi inches in tight, eyebrows raised in an expression somewhere between surprise and doubt. He doesn't do or say anything, though. He doesn't grab the salt. He doesn't look for a new plate. He just stands there, close enough to breathe on his son's neck, watching him cook a dish that neither of them has ever tasted.

 

OMIYAGE
お土産

The word for gift giving, a touchstone of Japanese culture, is
omiyage
, which literally translates to “product of the earth,” a local food from the place you were coming from. But while food (or drink) usually makes the best gift, there's more to
omiyage
than that.

TSUMARANAI
つまらない

Westerners are often tempted to hype their gifts. The Japanese, not so much. When giving a gift, use the customary line:
tsumaranai mono desu ga
: “It's nothing, actually, but please accept it.” They in turn may decline it a couple times, but you should persist.

MEIWAKU
迷惑

One job of the gift giver? Avoiding
meiwaku
—annoyance. Don't give a heavy bottle at the beginning of a night out. And don't get something needlessly expensive: custom requires a return gift worth about half the value, so your rich gift costs them.

MEIBUTSU
名物

The best gift of all may be the most classic:
meibutsu
, the most famous foods of any given region of Japan. Hairy crab from Hokkaido, grapes from Yamanashi, and so on. It's not a unique choice, but creativity isn't the goal here. Besides,
meibutsu
are delicious.

TAKKYUBIN
宅急便

Not ready to pack a hairy crab in your suitcase? Grapes don't travel well, either. Fortunately there is the ingenious
takkyubin
transport system, which will express-ship local products anywhere in Japan for reasonable rates.

 

In a country shaped by its regional specialties, the travel dilemma isn't where to go, but what to eat. These are the answers you're looking for.

(Matt Goulding)