Rice, Noodle, Fish (4 page)

I settle onto a stool at the long countertop and choose a cup of Cuban coffee from 1974. A middle-aged barista in a striped turtleneck spends ten minutes dribbling hot water in concentric circles through a vintage Japanese sock filter. The coffee is like nothing I've tasted before, with a round, vegetal quality and only the faintest hint of acidity.

It is not Tokyo's finest cup of coffee.
Until recently, that honor belonged to Daibo-san. But after thirty-eight years of slow filtration, Daibo retired at the end of 2013.

Tokyo's current coffee king is no doubt one of the new-wave wizards at work in Ebisu or Setagaya or Yoyogi, the hip corners of the city, where modern equipment, fresh beans, and time-aged technique combine to make powerful, balanced brews. But Ichiro trades in something more than technical precision—he offers a taste of the past, a reminder that there's always another way to do things.

On my way out, I see Ichiro sitting in his office, hands on his knees, a picture of him as a younger man hanging on the wall over his shoulder. He looks worried. “My supplies are down,” he tells me. “I used to have five tons of coffee aging in my storage, but now I'm down to less than a ton.” The soul of a
shokunin
: a 101-year-old man worried about inventory.

“What's your secret, Ichiro-san?” I ask. “Coffee, of course. I drink at least five cups a day.”

米 麺 魚

Yoshiteru Ikegawa knew that he wanted to cook chicken before he left first grade.

“At home we ate yakitori, but like most people in Japan we did it over gas in a small kitchen. But I'll never forget the smell of charcoal when my parents first took me to a real yakitori.”

Despite the early revelation, Ikegawa didn't do what most budding
shokunin
do: he didn't begin to slaughter chickens as a prepubescent boy; he didn't study their musculature and temperament in obscure texts found in dark library corners; he didn't even apprentice under a well-known yakitori chef—at least not at first. Instead, he did what a billion Japanese men had done before him: he became a salaryman. He put on a suit, took the train to work, drank with his colleagues, and remained loyal to his boss. But this wasn't a dream deferred;
on the contrary, it was part of his master plan.

“Most
shokunin
spend their entire lives in kitchens, never learning how to work directly with people,” says Ikegawa. “I knew early on that dealing with the customer is one of the most important parts of being a master, so I started with that.”

When he felt the business world had taught him the subtleties of customer service—above all, he says, how to give people what they want without their having to ask for it—he left the suit behind and took up an apprenticeship at Toriyoshi, an elegant yakitori bar in Naka-Meguro, where he trained for seven years, studying the bible of the flame-grilled bird. In 2007 he opened Torishiki next to Meguro Station, a lovely low-lit restaurant with a U-shaped bar centered around a small iron grill. His wife glides around the room in a kimono, dispensing drinks and good vibes to happy guests. The master himself stands at attention behind the fire, the spitting image of a
shokunin
: chiseled facial features, warrior stance, a rolled white bandanna tied tight around his clean-shaven head.

Yakitori, like all great food in Japan, is both perfectly simple and infinitely complex. In its most literal state, yakitori is chicken on a stick grilled over an open flame—conceptually only a step removed from caveman cuisine. It's drinking food, a companion to beer and sake found on the menus of izakaya and clusters of back-alley street stalls that cater to hungry salarymen on their way to the last train.

But yakitori cleans up nicely, too, and room for refinement in the hands of discerning Japanese chefs is infinite. The lack of variables puts all that much more pressure and scrutiny on the few factors each individual can control: the source and intensity of the flame; the provenance of the chicken; the butchering, seasoning, and, above all, careful cooking of its flesh. This isn't a matter of running a skewer through a chicken breast and cooking until firm; there are a thousand defining details that must be managed if you take yakitori as seriously as Ikegawa does.

Yoshiteru Ikegawa, yakitori master, ready for service

(Matt Goulding)

One of the predominant trends in the world of high-end yakitori in Tokyo today is the full anatomy experience. At places like Toritama in Shirokane, owner Shiro Izawa butchers his chickens into thirty-six distinct pieces, a forceful biology lesson for anyone who has dismissed chicken as one-dimensional. For the diner, the question isn't whether you want a skewer of small intestine, but what part of the small intestine you would like: the duodenum or the ileum?

Ikegawa doesn't subscribe to the full-anatomy theory. He doesn't divide the thigh into inner, outer, and middle pieces to challenge your understanding of a single muscle. On a given night, he offers a tasting menu that spans about a dozen cuts of chicken, the same ones you'll find at most respectable yakitori joints in Tokyo: breast, thigh, wing, organs. Seasonal vegetables find their way to the flame, as does the occasional piece of duck or pork, but chicken is the star of Ikegawa's dissertation, a spellbinding treatise on the world of tastes and textures found within a single animal.

In the procession of pieces, which Ikegawa changes based on his read of each guest, you find crunch and chew, fat and cartilage, soft, timid tenderness and bursts of outrageous savory intensity. He starts me with the breast, barely touched by the flame, pink in the center, green on top from a smear of wasabi; a single bite buries a lifetime of salmonella hysteria. A quick-cooked skewer of liver balances the soft, melting fattiness of foie with a gentle mineral bite. The
tsukune
, a string of one-bite orbs made from finely chopped thigh meat, arrives blistered on the outside, studded with pieces of cartilage that give the meatballs a magnificent chew.
Chochin
, the grilled uterus, comes with a proto-egg attached to the skewer like a rising sun. The combination of snappy meat and
molten yolk is the stuff taste memories are made of.

What separates Ikegawa from other serious yakitori, what has earned him a Michelin star and keeps his reservation book filled six months in advance, is the amount of care he puts into every last piece of flesh that meets his fire. He tinkers with each skewer as if it's the last piece of meat he'll ever cook, twisting, brushing, dipping, timing, tweaking—employing tight bits of motion to tease out the purest expression of each piece.

Ikegawa embodies the qualities that all
shokunin
share: unwavering focus, economy of motion, disarming humility, and a studied silence that never betrays the inner orchestra his life's work inspires. At any given time, he handles up to a dozen skewers sizzling over
binchotan
, an expensive hardwood charcoal that burns hot for hours, taming the fire with a wooden fan he keeps tucked into the back of his belt. When each piece is ready, he dips it into a large glass jar filled with a sweet lacquer of soy, mirin, and sugar, the indispensable
tare
that sits patiently next to all yakitori grills in Japan. His was a gift from his master, a twenty-five-year-old taste of Toriyoshi that Ikegawa feeds each day like a baker feeds an ancient starter.

After the procession of parts comes Torishiki's
onigiri
, a hulking triangle of rice basted with lavish amounts of rendered chicken fat and grilled until it looks like a lump of gold. I decide to take it back to the hotel to paw it in private, where it will be one of the great rice experiences of my life.

Before the bill, a cup of broth, a simmering distillation of everything that came before it. Chicken tea for the soul, a last respite before night falls over Tokyo.

米 麺 魚

The nighttime starts with a drinkable geography lesson: lemon from Ehime, golden ginger from Kochi Prefecture, and rice shochu from Kumamoto. For garnish, a light dusting of
sansho
peppercorn—then served atop a bar made from a giant cross section of five-hundred-year-old Hokkaido oak. The acidity hits first, then the warm sting of shochu, followed by a one-two punch of spice—the scratchy, throat-tickling heat of ginger, the aromatic, tongue-numbing tingle of
sansho
. The young bartender in a crisp white tuxedo looks on and nods, as if to say this is just the beginning.

Gen Yamamoto was born in a small town in Mie Prefecture and came to Tokyo to learn about beverages. He trained in Aoyama Dining Bar in Tokyo before moving to New York for eight years, working as the cocktail man behind a few of Manhattan's best Japanese restaurants. He learned a lot in those years—from serving huge crowds to constructing seasonal menus to speaking fluent English—but all along, he was distilling an idea for a cocktail bar the likes of which the world had never seen. In 2013 Gen returned to Japan and began to build out his dream. “I wanted to try something that you can only do in a city like Tokyo.”

Gen Yamamoto pours the next round.

(Matt Goulding)

Japan has a rich cocktail culture, one studiously built around classic drinks executed with precise technique. Mixologists invest a lifetime in learning how to perfect the hard shake, the gentle stir, the crystalline sphere carved from a giant block of ice. You will find textbook Gibsons and definitive Manhattans in drinking dens from Sapporo to Kagoshima, but you won't find many bartenders in this country pushing the limits of freewheeling cocktail creation.

Gen holds the same respect for refined technique as his colleagues, but he sees an untapped resource in Japan's cocktail culture: the country's bounty of vegetables, citrus, roots, and herbs. “We have amazing local citrus with soft flavors, but they don't mix well with gimlets so you don't see them in other bars. I don't make gimlets.” Instead, he draws on the full reach of Japanese climate and topography to build a menu that changes almost daily. Today he's
working with papaya and passion fruit from Okinawa, tomato and wasabi from Shizuoka, corn from Miyazaki—almost all of which he sources directly from the farmers themselves. At other moments of the year, you might find Hokkaido squash, Kanagawa carrots, Nagano quince, and a host of rare roots and esoteric herbs with seasons as fleeting as a full moon.

You can order à la carte, but it's the six-course tasting menu that best showcases Gen's vision. As with a great kaiseki feast, there is an arc to the stories he tells with his drinks, drawing heavily on the rituals of the Japanese tea ceremony, where technique, aesthetics, and an unwavering focus on microseasonality combine to create a vivid narrative.

To bring these liquid tales to life, Gen eschews the highfalutin tinctures and technologies favored by many Western bartenders—no volatile distillations, no blowtorched garnishes, no advanced equipment to speak of. He works with three primary tools: a strainer, a stirrer, and a long wooden muddler. It's the latter that allows him to transform seasonal produce into magic potions, using the blunt face to work fruits and vegetables down into smooth purees that form the base of most drinks. He uses no measurements, choosing instead to build the cocktails slowly, doing little half-stirs with his metal stirring spoon and tasting constantly as he creates.

No music, no wall decorations, nothing to take your attention away from the drinks and their methodical creation. I watch as Gen reduces lipstick-red tomatoes to a fleshy mass with the muddler, then strains the pulp and mixes it with rye vodka from Lithuania, using a tiny spoon and quick, short strokes to emulsify the tomato and vodka. He tastes, adjusts with a splash of vodka, stirs, tastes again, adjusts, adds a pinch of salt, stirs, tastes. He pours the drink into a clear glass cone, then cracks open a passion fruit and spoons the seeds onto the layer of tomato foam that has risen to the rim of the glass, dark orbs hovering
delicately on the surface. He sprays a piece of black slate with water, arranges a few loose flowers at one edge and the cocktail at the other.

“Thank you for waiting.”