Kichisen Kaiseki Dinner

Christmas Eve is my wife’s birthday, so we decided to go for kaiseki again. We arranged a babysitter for the little monsters, and called Kichisen for a reservation.

Kichisen was recommended to us by the Kyoto Foodies as the best traditional-style kaiseki in Kyoto. We were more than a little worried about the reservation, since we were calling just a couple of days in advance for dinner on one of Japan’s top date nights, at an amazingly celebrated restaurant whose chef beat Morimoto Masaharu on the original Japanese Iron Chef program — no mean feat, especially considering he won unanimously against Morimoto, who almost never lost. In the event, we called, and they said no problem, see you then.

Kichisen, known also as Kisen, is in Shimogamo, which is a triangular area of northern Kyoto defined by the two big streams that join to form the Kamogawa river. The restaurant is on the southwest corner of Shimogamo Shrine, an old (technically older than Kyoto itself, in fact) and picturesque shrine with lots of grounds that you can see from well down the Kamogawa. The doorway could be anything old-fashioned, really: a big house, a ryokan, anything. But it’s a restaurant.

We go in, slip off our shoes, and are led immediately to the right, into a little room with a bar and a stone floor. We’re given straw slippers to wear from the door to the bar, and I have some trouble putting them on because my feet are big and besides I’m wearing socks, the latter making it tricky to get the sandal thong between my toes. But the distance is about six feet, so it hardly matters. A burly man with a widow’s peak, wearing a white gi top — like a martial arts uniform — took my coat and folded it neatly on the shelf behind us. He also gave my wife a blanket to keep her legs warm, which is a common routine at nice places in the winter. We sat.

For Openers
The burly man went behind the bar and the various other attendants and such vanished. It was just us and him. After handing us hot towels, he promptly gave us these little dishes filled with hot dashi sprinkled with toasted rice (genmai, like in genmai-cha). Pleasant, warming, and stimulating the appetite.

He also checked that we spoke Japanese — me, no, but my wife certainly does — and then asked whether there was anything we don’t like to eat. Nope, we eat everything, no worries. (I wasn’t going to mention the one Japanese favorite I almost always dislike, which is boiled or simmered daikon, because I think he would have been well within his rights to chuck me out. It would be sort of like going to a high-end Italian place and saying you can’t stand garlic, cheese, tomatoes, or pasta. Not that daikon dominates Japanese food, any more than that little list dominates good Italian cooking, but it’s a constant presence. More about this later.)

On to the first course, presented in these cute little dishes, on top of this piece of calligraphy. He explained that we’re leaving the year of the Rat and entering that of the Cow, so in late December we get both. The calligraphy was, as I understand it, a poem with very heavy allusions to Sen no Rikyu, the inventor of tea ceremony and thus the ultimate forefather of kaiseki.

Inside the dishes, a range of things, not all of which we can identify. From left, clockwise, in the top container: Sliced duck squares sandwiched around a thin slice of sweet simmered something, possibly some kind of sweet turnip or maybe fruit. A cube of some kind of tofu cake, I think with gingko nuts in it. Broccolini simmered in what I believe was Tosa-zu (Tosa-style vinegar), seasoned with ground toasted sesame. A teeny-tiny piece of a stick of super-mild pickled ginger. In the very front right, where you can't see them, were two little long-simmered whole fish, to be eaten whole. In the lower dish were two things: yellow stuff and green stuff. My wife thinks the yellow stuff might have been prepared persimmon of some kind; I think she's wrong, but I can't offer any better guesses. The green stuff... no idea. Maybe some sort of bamboo shoot, but that's out of season, so who knows?


On With The Show
We continued with a clear soup: dashi, shiitake cap, teeny baby bok choy, and a cube made primarily of Ise-ebi (spiny lobster), garnished (aromatized) with julienned yuzu zest. The chef instructed us to taste the dashi first by itself, then drop the yuzu in the front and taste again, and then eat the things in the soup in between sips of broth. That business with the yuzu creates the effect called “aromatized”: the dashi remains dashi (and very good dashi at that!), but the yuzu adds an intense acid-floral aroma. My sense was that these two strongly different flavors are supposed to create a sort of frame for the things in the soup, but I could well be misunderstanding. In any case, it was nice finally to have a classic suimono clear soup made by somebody who’s into it, and I must say that it's lovely when done right.

Next up, otsukuri, which is the local term for what Tokyo-ites call sashimi. It didn’t come up, but it was becoming clear that if we had asked the chef, he would have told us that the proper word is “otsukuri,” although of course a lot of hicks from polluted holes like Tokyo use silly terms like “sashimi.” He is, as you’ll have figured out, pretty proud of Kyoto — “best food in the world.” He also doesn’t like food outside Japan, and told us about how he ate uni (sea urchin) in New York; his host apparently said it was very good, so he was polite, but actually he thought it was old and nasty. Tokyo, he doesn't like much either -- the air is foul and you can't breathe. The only place he seemed to have anything nice to say (other than Kyoto) was Finland, where he liked the fact that the air is clean. Back to food, he also didn’t like the bread in France, but we had to disagree (equally politely) about that one! In any event, the uni question came up because of the otsukuri he served.

The photo is too bright because of the shaved ice, I’m afraid, but you can still see what we ate. Dead-center is a raw shrimp, behind which is a pile of uni. Mmmm, I love uni. In the front is a baby daikon, and then the whole thing is garnished with little edible nibbles. He gave us some sheets of toasted nori seaweed and instructed us to wrap the uni in it, then dip lightly in soy. The shrimp and daikon got the ponzu with grated daikon and so on. Personally, I’m not a fan of raw shrimp, and now I know for sure that I just don’t like it all that much: if I didn’t like it at Kichisen, I don’t like it! But the uni was just right: seafood butter with a little texture, and with the dab of soy and the crunchy nori it was spectacular.

Then a hollowed-out yuzu steamed with rice, little dried berries, and tiny fluted potatoes. He encouraged me to photograph it both as presented (with the lid) and opened up. We didn’t quite figure out what the berries were. I thought they might be kuromame, black beans, but he said they were berries and gave the name — which my wife didn’t happen to know off the top of her head. It’s a rather specialized vocabulary, and probably he was using a regional dialect term anyway. They had a very mild taste and a little bit of crunch. The potatoes didn’t taste like all that much, really, but the rice and yuzu combination was warming and friendly after the icy otsukuri. Clearly part of the idea here is an alternation between snow and warmth, giving you the best things of December.


Climax
For me, the climactic moment — the best dish of all — was this cup. Inside was fugu, the much-discussed poison blowfish, covered with chopped thin negi (asatsuki) and a sauce of ponzu and other things I couldn’t quite place. I’d had things flavored with fugu before, but here we really got to taste what it’s like: mild, creamy, and rich. (My wife thinks that this might not have just been regular flesh, but obviously it can't be the liver, as the fugu liver is where the tetrodotoxin is, and if you eat more than a trace amount, you die. I think it can't have been organs of any kind, as I think then you'd have had some trace tetrodotoxin and gotten numb lips, which some fugu crazies enjoy.) In any event, it was extraordinary to me. The texture was reminiscent of uni, but firmer. The flavor was very sweet as fish go, and yet ocean brine-y. The only way I can explain it, I guess, is that this fugu was for me everything otsukuri and sushi really ought to be, but never is.

Back to the snows: crab legs split and served in shaved ice. The little dish in front contained the “mustard,” what the Japanese call the miso, i.e. the liver and fat of the crab. It was mixed with a little soy, dashi, ginger, and a little bit of some kind of citrus juice — I think sudachi, but I wouldn’t swear to it. We discussed this with him, while we drank off the dish — it’s for dipping, but it’s too good to let it go to waste. The usual way to serve cold steamed crab in the West is with something like a mayonnaise, which is nice, but my wife and I agreed that you really need something more acid to cut the richness. This combination was lovely: the richness was from the crab, in the form of its mustard; the acid comes from the citrus; and the whole thing is deepened with the Japanese standards of dashi and a very small amount of soy. The chef mentioned that the crab was from the Japan Sea, not Hokkaido, and that the ginger is Japanese, not imported, both of which make it enormously more expensive; his point wasn't that it was expensive, I think, but that he insists on these ingredients because (a) they're local, and (b) they taste better. [Admittedly, I think he probably thinks "local" and "tastes better" pretty much imply one another, but he wouldn't serve local ingredients that didn't taste good, whatever they cost.]

Back home, I will have to try something like this with lobster or softshell crab. I’ll pass on the soy and dashi, which don’t speak to me the way they do for the Japanese. But instead of just drawn butter and lemon, or mayonnaise, why not use the mustard or tomalley, a small squeeze of seasonal citrus, and then a teeny drop of white wine? Maybe just a whisper of finely-minced shallot too.

Now the next thing was much, much better than I think it had any right to be. Steamed or perhaps poached turnip on top of a little pile of amadai (tilefish, or Japanese branquillo), with grated daikon and minced negi, some gingko nuts, a little ball of mild wasabi on the top, all in a puddle of warm jellied dashi aromatized with toasted rice. Described that way, I would have assumed I’d hate this. But first of all it was made so well, and the flavors balanced so perfectly, that you really couldn’t dislike it. And coming after the snowy crab, once again the little dish of warmth was delightful. I would not want this dish by itself, though I wouldn’t complain, but in this context it was wonderful.

Next up, soba and then tempura. The soba came as you see it: a mound on a little wooden dish, in a basket lined with leaves, with a classic dipping sauce... or so we assumed. We were told that when we’d finished the soba, we’d have tempura with the same sauce. Now I will say that this soba must have been pure buckwheat flour, or nearly so, and was firmer and more flavorful than soba normally is. Other than that, it was mostly a sort of palate-cleanser: going from the squodgy turnip and amadai straight to rich tempura would be problematic.

Then came a basket of freshly-fried tempura, and we picked out equal portions, as you see here. Two shrimp, two quartered shiitake caps, a short stalk of pickled ginger, and a bit of gobo (burdock) stalk. I am not normally a fan of gobo, but this was terrific. And the shrimp were moist and creamy in a way that tempura, even good tempura, normally isn’t. All in all, the best tempura I’ve ever had, though I can’t say I’ve had all that much good stuff.

I was very proud of myself here. As we ate, I kept thinking that there was something odd about the sauce. On the one hand, this was your basic tentsuyu: mirin, dashi, and soy, with grated daikon mixed in. But it was slightly, yet distinctly, spicy. I asked what it was, and the chef said it was daikon. I insisted: what’s making is it spicy? He seemed quite pleased, and told me that it’s not normal daikon but rather karashi-daikon, which is indeed slightly spicy. He also called one of the other chefs in the kitchen to bring him a karashi-daikon to show me. It looked like a small kabu turnip: round, white, and about the size of a small baby’s fist. I think he was pleased because here was a foreigner who could identify the difference between types of daikon even when mixed into tentsuyu. I was, as I say, pretty proud of myself. (Thing is, karashi-daikon I consider a major improvement on regular daikon, having the sweetness of daikon, the sharpness of red radish, and none of that old turnip flavor I associate with daikon and which is why I dislike boiled daikon. I’m going to go looking for karashi-daikon at Nishiki market.)

The last major course was rice and pickles. The pickles were the round "thousand-slice" daikon pickles (senmaizuke) that are a Kyoto winter specialty, plus some preparation of lotus root that I couldn’t place. The rice is apparently this super-fancy rice grown just for him, and he asked if we could tell that it’s so good. I answered, honestly, that I could tell either that it’s extremely good rice or very well made, but beyond that I’m lost; since this rice fitted both descriptions, I’m afraid its spectacular qualities were largely wasted on me. He seemed mollified, though.


Closing Acts
For dessert, this beautiful dish. It’s a California citrus of some kind, which I still can’t place: it’s like a very tart orange with a green peel, but I don’t think it was actually underripe. Perhaps a green grapefruit? Anyway, he’d hollowed it out and made a medium-stiff jelly with the juice, which set back in the shell — no mean trick, this. Over the top, a fine web of lightly-cooked caramel, garnished with a shaving of caramelized peel. The sauce was, I think, dark-caramelized sugar, citrus juice, and just enough water (I’d guess) to keep it fairly thin. You put the web on the jelly, pour sauce over the top, and then dig in with a spoon.

Of course, because this was garnished with snow again, and was quite bitter-sour, we finished it up thinking, “hmm, kind of cold and bitter here.” So on came the second dessert: zensai, as they call it here. Red beans and mochi simmering in a little cup.

It came like this, with a lid on, and under it you can see the actual dessert.

In the bottom was a little mound of hot charcoal, which kept the mixture bubbling and very close to too hot to eat. My wife actually burned her tongue a bit, but she’s kind of a klutz that way.

I didn’t get photographs here, but we had another demonstration of the brilliance of kaiseki at its best. We’d finished the citrus thinking we wanted something hot and sweet, and we got it — but it was too hot, and too sweet. So what then? Well, then came bowls with a small amount of macha, powdered green tea, which is extremely bitter because you’re actually drinking the leaves as well as their infusion. Wonderful... but now kind of bitter in the mouth, albeit warm? Oh, yes, then came just a little mild tea to finish up. So each time you finished one thing, it took you just a bit too far in one direction, and then you got something that met this need but pushed a little too far in another direction, and so on. Fantastic, honestly.

The Chef's Table
While we drank our final tea, the chef chatted with us. As we’d long since realized, this burly man in the white gi was the chef, Tanigawa Yoshimi. The guy who beat Morimoto hollow on Iron Chef. The guy who seems to be one of the architects of the kyo-ryori movement against the over-elegance of kaiseki as such. (As I understand it, the point is that Tanigawa thinks much of kaiseki has lost touch with the rustic elegance that was so central for Sen no Rikyu’s chanoyu; it’s become sophisticated in a more urban, courtly style. His kyo-ryori emphasizes a greater simplicity, but as you can see, that’s not “down-home cooking” or anything like that, just a renovation of the aesthetic.) In any event, the guy who mopped my wife’s dish when she slopped on it (told you she’s a bit of a klutz!) was one of the most celebrated chefs in this whole cuisine.

You may recall that Chef Murata served us most of our food at Roan Kikunoi, and now Chef Tanigawa served us at Kichisen. This isn’t because we’re special: that’s how kaiseki (or kyo-ryori) works. Murata was less attentive, because he had three parties at the bar; Tanigawa was with us almost the entire time, though he didn’t stand over us, because we were alone at the bar.

By way of contrast, my wife gave me this link to an article in the New York Times. It's about a new fad, dining at the "chef's table." The idea is that when you go to some place like Craft or Blue Ginger or wherever, a place where the chef is more or less a celebrity (as Tom Colicchio and Ming Tsai are, at these restaurants), they actually cook your food. That's right, if you make a reservation weeks and weeks in advance, and pay extra, you too can have the special exclusive experience of having the chef of a fancy restaurant actually cook. Isn't that grand? The NYT reviewer seems underwhelmed by the cooking, but he doesn't criticize the concept.

Thing is, this is absolutely normal in kaiseki. If you go to Tanigawa's restaurant, or Murata's, you know that they're cooking. Where else would they be? Not that Tanigawa made every part of every dish we ate -- far from it. But every bit was done under his watchful eye, finished by his hands or with him standing over (and possibly yelling at) the guy doing the finishing, and served to us from his hands (actually two things were served by apprentices, but Tanigawa was a constant presence). And this isn't because we're special: that's how this cuisine is done.

In this situation, Chef Tanigawa really could have gotten away with murder: he could have tried to impress us with his wonderfulness, or awe us, or whatever. But that's contrary to the aesthetics he believes in. He wants us to eat and enjoy, and he works very hard indeed to make that happen -- but the hard part of that work is hidden, so as not to disturb us. He wants to entertain us, but he makes minimal use of his celebrity to do it. He did mention the Iron Chef thing, but actually the point was that it gave him an opportunity to ensure that we went home with a copy of the DVD of the show. He also put in a box of his own chirimen, in this case chewy little teeny semi-dry fish seasoned strongly with sansho. Why? Well, you want your guests to leave without that feeling that it's all just over, the sort of post-dining letdown, so you give them some gifties. The fact that he's a culinary celebrity helps him to do this, but it's not something he made a big deal about. My wife asked him, "What was doing Iron Chef like?" His complete response: "Shindoi" (tiring). As to Murata, whose book is apparently something of a sensation among Western cooks lately, and is on TV a lot, and so on -- he just never mentioned any of this, nor in fact made it clear who he was.

There's a kind of high elegance to that. You're being served dinner by a famous celebrity chef, but he's too busy focusing on you and your meal to make a fuss about himself. You're what matters, not him. Isn't that how it should be?

Conclusion
My conclusion? I really like kaiseki, kyo-ryori, whatever. It’s brilliant, elegant, sophisticated, and just beautifully constructed to produce a fabulous dining experience. Perhaps most importantly, it is completely unpretentious. No arrogance, superiority, or whatever. He just did what he did, and wanted us to enjoy it as best we could, and his explanations and so forth were clearly aimed at helping us get more out of it. But I don’t think he thought we needed helping along: he’d have done the same thing with any diners who seemed interested, pitched to the appropriate level.

So, after perhaps the best meal of my life, I find myself wondering: could kaiseki be done outside Japan? Arguably it doesn’t really exist outside the Kyoto area, but that’s not what I mean. I mean, could the whole approach, the conception of the cuisine, be reformulated elsewhere? At some point I’ll jabber about that here on this blog — you’ll be the first to be truly bored by it!

Birthday: Down and Then Up

It was my birthday on the 18th, and for once I didn’t have to spend most of the day running after my kids. So I meandered off for a nice lunch in the areas around the river (Pontocho and Gion).

Down With Gion
The weather wasn’t too bad initially, but it soon became so humid that I felt like I was swimming. So when I reached a lovely old street in Gion on which is a restaurant I’d had recommended to me, I thought, “this is just the thing.”

Nope. “Sorry, reservations only.” I got a nasty feeling that what they really meant was, “sorry, no sweaty foreigners,” which happens quite a lot in that area. But okay, fine, I’ll go a solid step down-market.

Nope. Turned away again, same thing. I was now getting irritated. Another place? Nope.

Okay, you’re thinking, these places were busy, they didn’t have space. Are you kidding? One place that turned me away was empty. I mean, like empty. One couple at an end table, otherwise deserted. “Sorry, reservations only.”

I was now sick of Gion. Pretty, yes, but yuck. Back over the river, I found that there was some kind of school holiday going on, and a zillion 12-year-olds in uniforms were crashing around everywhere making a hell of a ruckus. Scattered among them were a huge number of foreign tourists, which meant that I could tell what ordinary Kyoto-ites were thinking when they saw me: “damn foreigners.” I was distinctly annoyed, hot, and tired — nice way to spend my birthday, I don’t think.

Okay Lunch, Blah Day
Finally I wandered to Rokkoji just east of Karasuma, where tourists don’t usually go, and had a nice lunch at a place called Little Bean House [小豆家, I’m not sure how it’s pronounced]. Curry with mysterious but tasty things, raw pickle salad, tofu, cooked pickles, rice, miso soup. Quite good, not expensive, and in general a positive conclusion to a dispiriting morning. I then gave up and went home.

To be fair to Gion, it’s pretty. No, but actually I do think that these places meant what they said: reservations only. Turns out that the way these places do kaiseki, they make exactly X number of each dish, so they have to know well in advance how many people are coming. If you show up without a reservation, they don’t have food to feed you.

Anyway, I have decided that it’s healthier to believe this than that I was turned way for being white — which is entirely possible. But the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth, as it were (not to be snide about Little Bean House, which was perfectly good).

Up With Pontocho
The next morning, forewarned, my wife called ahead to make reservations. No problem: we got a reservation at Roan Kikunoi (露庵　菊乃井), just south of Shijo on Kiyamachi. It’s a slightly informal version of the very high-end kaiseki (or technically kyo-ryōri) place Kikunoi 菊乃井, which is much celebrated and often considered one of the best in Kyoto.

It was raining, because the edge of a typhoon is brushing the area, but at least it was passably cool. We dressed up a bit — I wore a black suit, but no tie, and we figured that though we might be taken for tourists, we’d at least be high-end tourists, which means a lot here.

(On this score, Kyoto reminds me of Florence. If you’ve been there and had waiters be nasty to you, chances are you were dressed like a shlep. If you go to Florence, wear a suit and tie, and eat when civilized people eat. Oh, and remember of course that the Florentine definition of “civilized” is “Florentine,” so eat when they eat, like 8:30 for dinner. You do that, you’ll love it. If you fake a few words of Italian as well they’ll adore you, because you’re showing how wonderful you think they are, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery.)

In any event, we got there. Roan Kikunoi is a neat little place jammed behind a large and especially ugly McDonald’s, and I must say I had a nagging worry in the pit of my stomach that this was not going to go well.

Bracing ourselves (well, I was), we came in and sat down at the bar -- definitely the way to do this, by the way, because the chefs make things on the other side of the bar and then hand them to you direct. We ordered some sake, took a deep breath, and ...

WOW. Okay? Wow.

I took photos of most of the courses, once it became clear that the chefs weren’t concerned about foreigners one way or another. My wife was being all chatty in high-speed Japanese, which meant they could be their own chatty selves back, and the older chef who seemed to be in charge was cracking jokes with us and other customers at the bar, lending the whole thing an informal, festive atmosphere. He did ask that I not use a flash, I think because he’d be blinded by it, but I find my camera takes horrible pictures with a flash anyway so that was no biggie. Besides, the Japanese love taking pictures of their meals, so I was pretty sure he didn’t care.

But before I get to the food, there’s one other little thing. I kept thinking that the older guy, who plated several of our dishes and was generally bounciest and most talkative, looked familiar. Then my wife noticed that unlike everyone else, his jacket had no name-tag. Then it hit us: that was Murata Yoshihiro, the Kikunoi chef, the man himself. The guy who plated my sashimi. The guy who, when we asked what one of the fish was, told us it was katsuo... which seemed odd, since it didn’t look much like katsuo, but... and then went, “oh, sorry, wait, no, I’m mixed up. That’s baby hamachi [called tsubasu].” The next course was katsuo, and when it arrives I say to my wife, I thought pretty quietly, “now that is katsuo,” at which point Murata, six feet down the counter, bursts out laughing and says, “right, katsuo, whoops!” Hard to explain, I guess — you had to be there — but it’s sort of like sitting at the bar in, I don’t know, Daniel, and realizing that the guy making jokes and giving you a little appetizer he’s just whipped up behind the bar is Daniel Boulud. If that makes any sense.

Another thing I found remarkable was how every chef did everything, sort of in a rough rotation. You always had one chef standing behind the counter looking on unobtrusively, so when you finished a course he was ready to get you the next. There were several very young chefs on the line, getting what appeared to be helpful, generally positive constructive comments from the older guys. One young guy was cutting a sheet of daikon — a classic technique you have to master, where you take a usuba (honking big straight-edged knife) and shave around and around a daikon to make one huge translucent sheet — and I could see that he wasn’t all that great at it, though the results were fine. As he went along, an older chef came over and gave him some pointers. Our impression is that Roan Kikunoi is where Murata does some of his training of younger chefs, who might move up to Kikunoi when they’re ready. Again, this gave the whole thing a pleasant, cheerful, family sort of atmosphere — relatively speaking: it’s a very high-end place. It was also interesting from a cooking standpoint, because in most Western professional kitchens (at least in America) most of the line chefs do one station and stick to it: they may or may not be able to do other stations, but on a given night a sauté guy is a sauté guy. At Roan Kikunoi, and my sense is at most serious kaiseki places, stations aren’t the system.

Anyway, what did we eat? We got the mid-grade lunch (you pick low, middle, or high; what’s more, you decide when you make the reservation, not when you get to the restaurant):

A Light Lunch at Roan Kikunoi
1) Sakizuke (amuse-gueule): Walnut tofu with very small grapes. No picture: we weren’t yet sure if it was okay, and didn’t want to be those sort of foreigners. If you buy Murata’s book, he’s got a picture there. (And a recipe: good luck with that. Honestly, the recipes aren’t difficult as such, but there’s no way you’re going to reproduce what he serves. I’ll come back to this in a later post.) It was sweet, cool, and at the same time lightly spiked with wasabi. My wife's comment was that she gets the seasonal thing here, because it's cool and pleasant to eat when it's still hot out, and wasabi seems somehow really tasty when it's summer, but at the same time it's getting to be fall, time to eat nuts and grapes and stuff. I couldn't have put it better.

2) Hassun (a sort of overture, setting the palette for the meal): gingko nuts, hamo eel rolled around gobo and rice, simmered-roasted chestnut, simmered mackerel (? we're guessing -- too many things at once to remember perfectly), salted ayu entrails with trout roe in a hollowed-out yuzu citrus, crunchy sweet potato shaped like a gingko leaf, pine needles made of roasted soba noodles. I’d never had gingko nuts, but my wife has: she remarked, “I’ve never had them this big or this good.” They were slightly sweet and great, simmered gently in sake and lightly salted. The whole show came under a little wooden cricket cage (some sort of cage, anyway); again, if you want to see it that way, look at Murata’s book. (Actually, he’s written several, but I mean the one that’s been translated as Kaiseki: The Exquisite Cuisine of Kyoto’s Kikunoi Restaurant.) The entrails thing didn't sound great when I read the recipe some months ago, but it was terrific, sort of like mildly fish-flavored tofu or yuba with a more complex texture, and the trout roe (which was like firmer salmon roe) really set it off, as did the intense floral aroma of the yuzu. I would never have expected that of all the things in this course that one would be my favorite, but it was spectacular.

3) Mukozuke (sashimi): tai 鯛 (sea bream) and baby hamachi (not katsuo!), garnished with chrysanthemum leaf, pickled chrysanthemum petals, and corkscrews of shaved cucumber and carrot. The tai was much firmer than I’m used to, which gave it a distinctiveness that I often find ordinary sashimi lacks.

Sea bream is one of those things that the Japanese get very worked up about. Tai is sort of the ultimate fish here. I've never really gotten this, and to be honest, I still don't. It was lovely, yes, but I confess that I didn't see why it deserved the big deal people make of it. I do think that I'm starting to develop some sense of a palate for sashimi, which is probably unfortunate, given that when I get home I'm almost never going to have the good stuff.

4) Yakimono (grilled dish): katsuo 鰹 (bonito) tataki, which means it’s beaten to soften it up, then marinated and grilled very hot and left raw on the inside. Served with ponzu (citrus-soy) and red grated dashi. I’ve had this dish before, here in Kyoto, and I found myself thinking that this was a completely different dish, just utterly unlike what I’d had. I had thought it a bit fishy and with a somewhat problematic texture: flaky outside, raw inside. I have also long thought ponzu overrated. But this was fabulous. If you've ever had katsuo you now see why I identified it so easily: this triangular shape with the deep red is what it invariably looks like. It's meaty and in some ways more interesting than tuna, I think. I'm not sure why I don't see this at US sushi places, because given how popular tuna is -- and how much cheaper katsuo is -- you'd think it would be perfect. Maybe it doesn't keep well? In any event, really good ponzu, really good katsuo, the latter perfectly treated -- yum!

5) [not sure -- maybe a sort of palate-refresher like naka-choko?] : hamo eel-bone crackers. Very lightly salted, served with no sauce or anything. Crunchy and delicious, a great light thing after the meaty katsuo.

Eel-bone crackers I've heard about a lot of times, and I've seen pictures in which you get an entire eel backbone fried in a sort of coil. I've always thought it looked pretty but also rather unappetizing, even in the pictures I've seen from Nobu: it looks like what it is, in fact, i.e. a fish skeleton. These little crunchy nibbles were like nothing so much as cracklings: sort of the most ultimately high-end pork rinds ever. What's more, they make you sit up straight, because they're all calcium! I can't get over how these little munchies were such a great thing, so homey and everyday and yet totally unfamiliar.

6) Futamono (substantial soup, usually nimono): harvest soup with hamo covered in toasted rice, egg “tofu” cut in a moon shape for moon-viewing season, and Tamba shimeji mushrooms. You really taste the dashi in this, and it’s quite true what they say: it offsets and elevates everything, providing an almost silken background. We joked with Murata about the fact that he sometimes serves this dish with matsutake mushrooms instead, which cost a fortune; he ruefully laughed with us. (When I say they cost a fortune, I mean that, for instance, I recently saw some very nice ones at Nishiki market, priced at 38000 yen for a box of 8 fat ones. That's about $40 US per mushroom. And you can go well up-market from that if you want to. They're the truffles of Japan, at base.) These Tamba shimeji (i.e. from Tamba) were terrific, though: I don't know whether it was just the mushrooms or something in the preparation, but whereas I usually find shimeji just fine but a little bland, these were earthy and rich and intense.

7) Shiizakana (assorted dish with multiple elements): grilled or broiled suzuki (Japanese sea bass) with some finely-grated green herb we couldn’t identify, which was also in the daikon “dip” on the left. I liked this fine, but I found the herb too mystifying to make sense of the whole dish; suzuki also doesn't have any particular associations for me -- it's just mild white fish, a lot like good sea bass from the Atlantic. Given how excited people in Boston get about bass, though, I'm guessing this is something pretty meaningful for the locals.

If anyone out there has any guesses what this green stuff might be, I'd be grateful for an explanation. It had a light, grassy sort of flavor, and somehow the whole dish, although it came together, just didn't seem to me to stand out very well. Maybe it's also that I am not the biggest fan of grated daikon (I don't hate it or anything, but I don't really get the fascination with it. Now boiled daikon, boiled until mushy -- that one I can't stand.)

8) Gohan, konomono, tome-wan (rice, pickles, and soup): grated lotus-root soup (what they call here a vegetable potage -- that's the French term) with a kind of mochi ball (pounded glutinous rice, in this case not sweet); pickled daikon, eggplant, and kombu; and uni rice. See those chunks of orange? That’s sea urchin: uni 海栗. Lots of uni. Really a lot of uni. Did I mention there was uni? What’s more, the young chef who presented this one tossed it in a kaman 釜 pot right there, and they made enough that we could have seconds. We did: my wife joked that I should know how to say “okawari,” which means “more please,” because we’ve taught Sam to say it at his nursery school — the chef who dished up the seconds thought that was pretty funny (my impression is he has kids). There was some more left, too, so he made it into nigiri balls and wrapped it so we could take it home. Now that’s my idea of a good late-night snack: uni rice nigiri made by one of the finest kitchens in Kyoto. Oh -- the soup was great, as were the pickles. But... did I mention about the uni rice?

9) Mizumono (sweet): sorry the picture is blurry, but I was a little dazed after the uni rice. Walnut ice cream and a creamy caramel flan sort of thing — a little different from the usual Western version, but in subtle ways I can’t explain coherently. As we were finishing up, the chef chatted with my wife about where we were from and so on; his judgment was, “Boston? Good fish there.” They also discussed lobster.

We staggered out, replete, to find Chef Murata waiting. He said polite things, thanked us for coming, and saw us to the door with lots of bowing. I mean, yes, they’re supposed to do that, but it’s pretty cool to have a super high-end chef seeing you off in classic formal style.

For the next hour or so, we just wandered around the general area, because we couldn’t face doing anything else. The only problem was, you’d pass restaurants with all these appetizing photos of their food outside, and think, “you’ve got to be kidding: I’m not eating that.”

The last thing the other chatty chef (the one who talked about Boston and lobster) said to us was that a lot of nice fish is just starting to come in around the Japan Sea, which was a polite way of suggesting that maybe we should come back again in October. I think we will. And maybe the next month too....

So now I’m wondering: what would have happened if we’d had the top-level lunch at Kikunoi, rather than the mid-level lunch at Roan Kikunoi (which is cheaper). Would it have been as stunning? Would it have been as much fun? What about dinner (which starts at about $300 US per person — ouch)? Right now, I find it hard to imagine. That was one of the best meals I have ever eaten, not just because the food was stunningly terrific (which it absolutely was) but also because of a wonderful atmosphere that actually made me feel welcome: they all genuinely seemed to care if I liked what I was eating, every step of the way.

Technically, it was still my birthday, at home on the East Coast anyway. A nice way to turn 38!

Uosue Lunch (うをすえ)

Today my family were off at school, doing errands, and whatnot, so I had lunch alone. I decided to try Uosue, a little hole-in-the-wall kaiseki place just east of Karasuma-dōri, one block south of Shijo. It’s a little hard to spot if you’re not looking for it, it’s so small, but we’d heard that it’s very good and has an inexpensive two-level lunchbox set (niju bento). You can also order a full-on omakase meal, where they prepare what they think is good today, and that’s 3950¥, but the lunchbox set is only 1050¥, just a hair less than $10 US.

The atmosphere in this tiny place is very homey and informal. The guy at the end of the bar was cracking jokes with the fish-cutting guy, and the businessmen who came drifting in for lunch were treated politely but warmly, which doesn’t go without saying around here. They were nice to me, and welcoming. It all seems to be one family: the fish-cutting guy and the older lady in the back appear to be married, and the young guy who was making dashi referred to the old lady as “mother,” and so on. I think there’s a brother in the back doing hot things. So it seems to be pretty much a little family business, and it’s very good: unpretentious, friendly, informal, but with excellent food.

You can see what I got in the picture. One level is rice, and the other has (clockwise from the front) a little sashimi, some nimono (煮物, vegetables simmered in flavorings), and a little pickle. In the back, in the white cup, is chawan mushi (茶碗蒸し, steamed teacup), which is a sort of light savory custard, made of egg and dashi (出汁), steamed in its little cup. In the black bowl is miso soup.

Eating this meal and thinking a bit about blogging, it occurred to me just how difficult this is going to be. I mean, you can’t really say, “I had sashimi.” It was sashimi, yes, but what fish? Having seen him cut it, I’m pretty sure it was katsuo (鰹, bonito, or skipjack tuna), but if I hadn’t seen him I’d be guessing unless it was something obvious like maguro (鮪, tuna steak). I have an awful lot to learn—but I do have some time!

(Incidentally, I should perhaps note in passing that I am providing a lot of kanji, Chinese characters, for things I eat. This isn’t showing off—I get the stuff from dictionaries, not from memory, mostly—but on the other hand it’s not really how Japanese people do this. If you see maguro for sale, almost invariably you will see it written マグロ, ma-gu-ro, instead of as 鮪. The thing is, I did Chinese for a while, and it’s in many respects easier for me to deal with the characters. What’s more, the characters translate across East Asian languages pretty effectively, which the syllabary doesn’t. I’m also indicating my little private protest against the de-kanjification of Japan. Anyway….)

Okay, so the sashimi was very good, and the wasabi (山葵, a character-pair I have not seen yet in Japan, but which means “mountain hollyhock”—what’s so hard about that?) was the real thing. As you may not know, the green wasabi paste you get in any but the highest-end sushi places outside Japan is not in fact wasabi at all: it’s horseradish dyed green. Wasabi itself is very expensive, because it only grows in clean mountain streams and requires intensive cultivation. You can get it here in the supermarkets if you look, but it’s pricey, and the root is about half the size of a horseradish root. You don’t use much, and you grate it immediately to order, and I’m told it doesn’t store well—all of which are good reasons why ordinary folks even in Japan don’t generally shell out for it. If you have it, you’ll know, because (a) the texture is not completely smooth, since it is hand-grated, and (b) it has a milder, sweeter taste than horseradish, to which it is not related. In any event, the shiso leaf underneath, which you can barely see, and the shredded daikon underneath that, were the usual. Yes, that is curly parsley, I don’t know why.

The nimono... this is the tricky bit. What were those lovely things? I can identify some of them, but with others I’m guessing a bit. Okay, so let’s start with the long skinny thing. I think this was very young bamboo shoot, though I’ve never seen it this thin. It had that mild, slightly creamy flavor, though, and was just yielding. Due south of that is what I thought was a circle of eggplant (the little narrow kind that are very popular in Kyoto in this season), but it turned out to be sato imo (里芋), the white taro I had as tempura at Honke Owariya. It was good, I thought, but not especially remarkable to my unsubtle palate. Southwest of that is a little red square. This was a cube of something firm and gelatinous, like very rubbery Jell-o. If this were China, I’d have been absolutely sure this was a cube of gelatinous pork blood, but this being kaiseki in Japan I knew for damn sure that wasn’t it. In the end, I have no idea what it was. It was good, flavor-wise, but I have never been a big fan of the rubbery gelatin thing, so the texture didn’t work for me.

Continuing around clockwise, there is a little cake. I am pretty sure this was primarily kinpira gobō, i.e. burdock root and carrot simmered a long time together, somehow made into a cake and simmered some more, like the fish balls in oden. I’m also pretty sure this was not a fish ball, but it might have been so subtle that I couldn’t tell. Now kinpira gobō has never been a favorite of mine, and you may recall that my wife’s kinpira rice burger at Mos Burger still leaves me in a cold sweat at the memory. But this was wonderful. I’d eat five more of these in a heartbeat. I’m just hoping this is something you can get in oden, because once the weather turns cold I’m going to Nishiki market to see if I can find these things. Wish I knew what it was....

Next up, a perfectly-turned little potato. I’ve never actually seen a perfectly-turned potato outside of photographs. This is something that people like Jacques Pépin had to learn to do when they worked at the highest-end Paris restaurants, but nobody does it much any more. Well, here they do. As to flavor, it was very mild. I was expecting something stronger, because since potato has very little flavor of its own I’m used to having it “spiked,” as it were. But I did actually get some rather refined potato flavor from this, which was rather pleasant and home-like.

Above that, in the corner, is a piece of eggplant with some kind of slightly sweet sauce on it. Wow! Along with the kinpira cake, this was my favorite. Soft and yielding, but still with a little bite—perfectly cooked eggplant. The sauce was I think mostly miso and mirin or sake, with a small amount of sesame on top. You usually see this combination broiled: you split an eggplant, put it on a flat stick that’s like a bamboo fork, spread thinned miso paste on the top, and run it under a broiler. This was much the same flavor, but simmered. Excellent!

Top right, a roll of tamago yaki, the rolled egg omelet. I used to hate this, because it’s usually sickly sweet, but in Kyoto they just use dashi and no (or very little) sugar. It was good, I thought, but I can’t say it knocked me over. Just in front of that is a piece of fish that I cannot identify. Mackerel, maybe? Saury? I don’t know. It was nice, whatever it was. And on top of that is a little rainbow-striped leaf-shaped cake of this spongy stuff I’ve seen several times here, which turns out to be kōya-dōfu (高野豆腐), a kind of freeze-dried tofu invented centuries ago at Kōyasan.

The pickle in the back right corner was actually a bit spicy, and I suspect it was the local green pepper which, unlike most Japanese peppers, is mildly hot. But I’m really not sure.

The chawan mushi was truly excellent. I’ve never entirely understood this dish until now. Basically it’s just dashi with egg whisked in thoroughly, steamed gently until the egg is just barely set. You put a few things in the bottom, like maybe a shrimp, a little vegetable, or whatever, and then as you eat the custard you keep turning up these little treasures. Now I’ve had this a number of times before, and I’ve always thought it was sort of mediocre: salty, bland, and pointless. Today I figured it out. The whole thing is about the dashi, not the egg at all. The egg doesn’t taste like much, and the little treasures are pretty simple, but the whole point is that everything is offset by the dashi. In a way, it’s a method of showcasing the flavor of dashi, whereas usually dashi is used to help amplify the flavor of something else. Because Uosue is a real kaiseki place, albeit an inexpensive one, they’re quite hard-core about their dashi. As a result, their chawan mushi is fabulous. Of course, the texture of the egg was creamy and all that, and the little pieces of kamaboko (fish cake) and some sort of unidentified fish were perfectly good, but the dashi was wonderful. I finally got it!

The miso soup, just to finish up here, was perfectly good, but I didn’t notice anything particularly special about it one way or another. It was the usual kind, with a little wakame seaweed, not clam or something like that. I liked it, but after the chawan mushi and some of those nimono, it was pretty unremarkable.

All in all, I’d give Uosue a big thumbs-up. I got a fabulous lunch, which incidentally was much more filling than I’d have expected, for under ten bucks. Each little thing was very good in its own way, and they also went together very effectively. One of these days I’ll come back here and try an omakase dinner for 3950¥, and I’m sure I won’t be disappointed.