The Bizarre Truth (24 page)

For hundreds of years, it was restaurants themselves—not the food or chef—that were famous. Certainly, many chefs garnered fame for inventing certain dishes at certain restaurants, especially in America. Chefs of the Delmonico Restaurant in the nineteenth century were justifiably famous, not necessarily by name or face, but by reputation. And it didn’t matter who was cooking—you always knew someone good was there, much like Commander’s Palace in New Orleans today. This has been home to some of the greatest chefs working in the South. You knew every time you went there, year in and year out, that it was going to be good.

Over the course of time, the restaurateur, the owner, became famous, or the man running the room. Pavilion in New York was a famous restaurant, but when Andre Soule was in his heyday, in New York’s Truman Capote era of the fifties and sixties, Pavilion reigned supreme. People flocked to Pavilion, and everyone remembers Soule and the restaurant but not the chef or the food. Which isn’t to say it wasn’t good or he wasn’t a star; it’s just that society in those days placed a larger premium on other facets of restaurant life than it does today.

For the past few decades, restaurants have been all about the chef. Thomas Keller, Wolfgang Puck, Charlie Trotter … These guys are regarded more like rock stars than chefs. And deservingly. I’d put myself in the long list of people who’d be willing to wait for weeks in a freezing cold rain for a meal at the French Laundry.

These days, the ingredients are as important as the person cooking it. You go to many restaurants not just to see what a certain chef can do with a given menu or oeuvre, but to eat ingredients available nowhere else. Sometimes the chef and his ingredients are synonymous. People flock to Blue Hill in New York not only to taste Dan Barber’s food, knowing that means the most farm-fresh ingredients. In terms of menu, only the most discriminating of chefs can offer the kind of shopping Barber is capable of, mainly because he grows and raises much of his ingredients. Today, it’s all about ingredient worship, and I think sushi bars are the most obvious places to witness that development.

When it comes to ingredients, Japan’s respect for food matches Italy’s passion and simplicity. Like Japanese cuisine, Italian food at its essence is extremely simple, extremely seasonal, and not overly complex or clichéd. But the Japanese are indeed special. I think it’s the only culture in the world where a single pickled plum served on a giant plate gets the kind of oohs and aahs that are otherwise reserved for more ambitious culinary pyrotechnics. In Japan, “simple” really works in a way that it doesn’t elsewhere. It’s pretentious when I see that type of cooking in other restaurants;
they are just imitators and replicators, as opposed to true disciples. When you’re in a Japanese restaurant where a chef is actually making complex philosophical decisions about what to put on a plate, it can get really impressive. Japanese chefs would never serve that plum at its peak of ripeness just sitting naked on a dish; they would feel rightfully obligated to cook or prepare it in some way, even subtly. I mean, that’s why you go to a restaurant, right? If you want to eat the perfect raw plum, you go see a farmer; you wouldn’t go see a chef. But—and it’s a big but—if anyone cooks food in a more naked or exposed or simple oeuvre than the Japanese do, I haven’t seen it.

Great Japanese chefs do just enough to those items to heighten the eating experience without killing the ingredient. An ingredient captured at its peak moment of texture and flavor may not need much tweaking, which is why Mizutani’s “less is more” approach works.

Mizutani himself greeted me at the door while his wife and assistant tidied up the kitchen and helped with some mis-en-place work—it’s still a restaurant, after all. He invited me to sit at the sushi bar and asked me for my order. Who would better know what to order than Mizutani himself? I opted for an omakase-style meal, where you let the chef take the reins and pray for the best.

Of course, I had nothing to worry about here. Mizutani serves only the best. Japan grows great rice, and Mizutani has been getting his from the same family for years. All their rice is hand planted, tended, and harvested in small batches. The care with which Mizutani prepares the rice is astounding. He washes and dries it, then gently cooks and seasons it with his specially formulated vinegars to give it a faint sweetness. This special care affects the way he cuts and stores his fish, and the way he handles individual pieces of fish, especially ones with a high fat content—like certain cuts of tuna—not allowing the warmth of his hand to change the texture of the fish. Rice. Fish. Plate. Simple, but not easy.

I watched as he handled the mackerel, or saba. He cups the fish in his hand, keeping his palm in contact with the rice for a different length of time, depending on the fish itself, transforming the flavor for the better, making it less fishy and less oily, as the warmth of the rice and his hand actually draws some of that oil from the fish into the rice itself. In a sense, he cooks with his hands.

What blew me away the most were the little things. I received the fish one piece at a time, and each one had a story. This mackerel was caught by his friend; that scallop, hand collected by divers he knew in the north—and he bought only four or five a day when they were available at the Tsukiji Market. I received a thin slice from the top of the scallop, still in its shell, and watched as he draped it on top of the shari, the vinegar rice with the barest brush of wasabi. He invited me to dip the piece of scallop sushi in soy sauce, which is so phenomenal that I contemplated drinking the stuff like a shot of espresso.

It’s not that Mizutani serves the most unusual fish. My meal ran the full gamut of traditional fish, such as kagai, mirugai, and hokigai. However, superior freshness, presentation, and symphony of texture exalted this meal to a new level. I ate several different types of flounder, called hirame. The dorsal fin was one of the most fabulous textures of any sushi I’ve ever eaten: crisp and corrugated, sweet and briny. The monkfish liver was kissed with sake and mirin, warmed ever so slightly. He followed up with paper-thin slices of abalone draped over rice sushi style, chutoro (which is the meaty and fatty cut of bluefin tuna taken from the belly), incredibly fatty otoro as well, along with maguro.

The squid was so fresh and delicate, cut with a dazzling sort of diamond cutter’s expertise. Millions of little knife marks ran across the flesh in a crosshatch pattern, allowing the fish to literally disappear on your tongue. I had two types of eel, freshwater and saltwater, braised in a soy, sugar, and mirin sauce, reduced down to a syrup. The fish is cooled and cut to order, sauced and
thrown under a broiler to char the edges, then draped over small balls of rice.

Mizutani served the best uni that I’ve ever eaten in my life. He directed me to his uni guy at the market. A few days later, a friend and I bought a whole tray of uni, about 500 grams. We demolished the whole thing with two spoons, standing in the area between food stalls at 10 in the morning as cleanup crews hosed down the market’s walkways.

The shad that I had, a small bony fish that is also called kohada, is usually a very pedestrian sort of fish in America, but in the hands of Mizutani, it was absolutely insane. His knife work is amazing, and he left little bits of skin on the shad but cut away other little pieces of the skin so it simply disappeared in the mouth. I had aji, a Spanish horse mackerel minced as a little sashimi course, that was ethereal. These offerings are normally fishy even in the best of eateries; here they aren’t. And his cooking skill is amazing.

Everybody raves about his tamago. This egg dish is placed in a square or rectangular pan, cooked in thin sheets and folded on itself, then pressed into a block. It is typically sweetened, and it makes a great last bite in a sushi meal. Mizutani’s tamago was creamy and textured in a way that reminded me of ripe peaches.

I’m a big student of art history. In that field we always talk about the space that sculptures occupy, but more important, we should also talk about the negative space where something isn’t. Often, less is more. It’s the greatest discipline challenge for chefs. I love young, bold, brash chefs. I love to eat their food. Their experimentation is awesome, but often there are one too many ingredients on the plate. A bold, brave chef who’s been around the block a few times yet still harbors that energy and curiosity in the kitchen relies less on gimmicks and needs fewer ingredients. Ingredients, pyrotechnics, and architecture in the kitchen is a great way to cover up lack of skill. Serving a single piece of fish placed on a small mound of vinegar rice is naked cooking. You’re on a tightrope
without a net. This simplicity and greatness come only from those who understand that all good cooking stems from good shopping.

But Mizutani is more than a shopper. He’s disciplined enough to buy only foods at their peak of flavor. He knows the best way to handle and prepare a fish. This passion translates to patrons. He is a master, and that is what he loves the most. It’s why he doesn’t have twenty seats. It’s why he likes to seat people only at his sushi bar. He wants to continue the connection he has with his purveyors, his ingredients, his techniques with the people he’s ultimately trying to resonate with. A great chef or restaurateur knows great food doesn’t end in the kitchen. It ends on the table. And to think that this type of perfection and artistry sit unassumingly in a basement in Ginza.

aedeker’s antique travel books wax poetic about pulling into a city by boat. I often think of how gorgeous the confluence of waterways must have looked at the site of the ancient city of Constantinople, now Istanbul. How it must have looked to visitors arriving by ship through the Bosphorus, with Asia on one side, present-day Europe on the other, and the Blue Mosque straight ahead. Imagine arriving into Venice hundreds of years ago, when the rest of the world lagged so far behind culturally and architecturally. What a staggering and surprising sight that must have been, or the Canton of a thousand years ago, or sailing up the Thames into eighth-century London when it was traded back and forth among warring tribes of Norsemen on a yearly basis. Modern times don’t allow for too many sea-travel opportunities, save mega-cruise ships that lack the certain, romantic
je ne sais quoi
that they used to, and nowadays cruise ships sit in the most unglamorous of ports, shunned from the prime locales mostly for reasons of efficiency. But I think descending through the cloud cover via airplane can be absolutely breathtaking as well.

I’ve flown over and into Quito’s Avenue of Fire. Following a valley of dormant and active volcanoes, we descended into one of the highest elevated capital cities in the world. To see these volcanoes from overhead is intimidating in the extreme and stunning, with the green and gold of the highlands peeking far up to the shoulders of the mountains themselves before giving way to rocky crowns.
As far as man-made sights go, nothing beats landing at New York’s La Guardia airport, with its stunning view of the most famous skyline in the world. The shores of Samoa from the air are exquisite; ditto Hawaii. A daytime landing into Tokyo always means a great peek at Mt. Fuji, looking just the way it does on postcards, replete with its white cake-frosting drips of snow running down its face.

I’ve racked up well over a million frequent-flier miles, and to my mind, landing in Marrakesh, Morocco, still remains one of the most wonderful sights to take in from a plane. A vast, brown hardscrabble desert abruptly morphs into a sprawling city, with thousands of clay-tile-roofed buildings, not one skyscraper in sight. Drying laundry, strung on lazily stretched lines, crawls from small chimneys to iron pipe jutting out of the side of a neighbor’s house, crisscrossed and repeated over the whole of the ancient red cityscape. And then there are the satellite dishes, poking out of every single home. And I mean every home. It’s an ocean of satellite dishes in the middle of the desert. I found myself absolutely enchanted by this juxtaposition of ancient and modern life. It made me smile all the way through landing and the lengthy immigration process.

Morocco feels like the ultimate food trip. Romantic to say the least, Moroccan cuisine is highly refined, very country-specific—that is to say, unique and delightfully easy to navigate. Chicken, lamb, mint, lemon, chile, cumin, honey, orange, rinse, repeat. As I exited the airport, the sights, sounds, and scents of the city overtook me. Mint tea is to Marrakesh what Starbucks is to New York—you can’t go five feet without seeing it up close and personal. Every restaurant, every food stall, and every merchant offers mint tea to any customer or passerby, and the aroma is always lying heavy in the air. The fresh mint mixes with cooking smells, cinnamon, and sour perspiration, which to an ethnocentric Western nose might sound disgusting, but for me it’s become a familiar odor I associate with the vibrancy and claustrophobia of northern African life.

By the time we landed in Morocco, I could barely keep my eyes open. I flew all day and night, and arrived smack dab in the middle of the day. It’s one o’clock, and all I want to do is sleep for eight hours, which will do nothing but royally mess with your system. I’ve discovered that a little sunshine, exercise, and a catnap by the pool is the key to combating jet lag. Sitting by a five-star hotel’s pool in Morocco is, in many ways, like sitting by any luxury hotel pool … except when it comes to the staff. With a ratio of nearly one staff member to each guest, you can’t help but be impressed by the graciousness and attentiveness—it almost makes you uncomfortable with its cloying sense of devotion. I appreciate good service, but I loathe endless sycophantic kowtowing to the point where you have to kick somebody out of your hotel room because they are simply overstaying their welcome. Offering to do everything but brush your teeth for you just feels downright awkward.