The Man Who Ate the World (19 page)

I called Pim Techamuanvivit, a San Francisco–based Thai woman, whose Web site, Chez Pim, has become one of the most famous food blogs in the world. She used to undertake complicated behavioral research for high-tech companies in Silicon Valley and now spends the cash she made there traveling the world, eating in expensive restaurants, and photographing her dinner for her blog. I told her what I was looking for.

She laughed. “They won’t let you in.”

“Why not?”

“You’re a round eye.”

Plus, she said, you don’t speak Japanese. She told me about a Japanese-American friend of hers who had considered herself reasonably fluent in Japanese, until she was refused bookings at some high-end Tokyo place because her grasp of the language was not considered good enough. I shouldn’t feel put out, Pim said. Many of these restaurants are
closed to Japanese people, too. A lot of them won’t grant you entry unless you are recommended by an existing customer; ideally one who is related to you by blood. Then there was the bill to worry about. She told me $1,000 a head wasn’t uncommon.

The money thing was frightening. Into my mind came an image of my platinum credit card, that dear sliver of gunmetal gray plastic that had become such a friend to me on this journey, now suddenly belching smoke,
Mission: Impossible
style, as it came into contact with the bill. Otherwise I liked what I was hearing. I still appreciated the notion of democracy attached to high-end restaurants, the way the price of dinner might buy you a glimpse of a plutocrat’s gilded life, but I liked this Japanese idea of specialness even more. Getting into these restaurants wasn’t simply about financial heft. It was about connections, about proving your worth in other ways.

It was, of course, completely undemocratic, grossly elitist and, being rooted in an unspoken anti-Western racism, utterly reprehensible. Even so, I couldn’t stop myself imagining that there was a direct and positive correlation between the difficulty in obtaining a booking and the unalloyed deliciousness of the food available. As I pursued these reservations I became convinced that, simply by landing them, I would mark myself out as some kind of hardcore gastronomic ninja, a seeker after true taste. I would be the Roald Amundsen of the table, the Ernest Shackleton of the sushi bar. High-end Japanese restaurants are like that. They can turn you just a little bit mad.

One day, not long before my trip, I went to see Jean-Luc Naret, the French head of the Michelin restaurant guides who was in London to launch the new British edition. Though it hadn’t yet been announced officially it was suspected that Michelin was working on a Tokyo guide. I told Naret what I was looking for, that I wanted the names of the really small places, serving only the good stuff, and he promised to help me. As requested, I e-mailed him. He never replied.

I called Mark Edwards, the London-based executive chef for the
Nobu group worldwide. I asked him for recommendations. He said he could do better than that. He said he could get Nobu to book them for me.

Nobu!

Booking tables!

FOR ME!

I was a made man. Surely every door would open now? Nobu Matsuhisa himself—the man responsible for spreading the doctrine of high-end Japanese food about the world, Robert De Niro’s best pal, the one who feeds all those slinky models and actresses who don’t eat—he was going to play concierge just for me. He was going to get me dinner dates. Job done.

Except it wasn’t. Having offered to perform a task I had never asked of him, Edwards stopped returning my calls and e-mails until it was far too late. The days until my trip slipped away, the window for making impossible-to-get bookings becoming smaller and smaller. I imagined Nobu rolling his eyes at Edwards’s request. Reservations? For a London restaurant critic? Don’t be so bloody silly. Now, plate up some more of the black cod in miso that the skinny models and actresses like to pick at.

With just a week to go until my trip, I threw myself upon the mercy of Hide Yamamoto, the executive chef of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, where I would be staying. I gave him a budget of $500 a head per meal. Yamamoto said he would see what he could do.

Which is how, on my very first night in the city, overtraveled and underslept, scrubbed and suited, Tokyo-dazzled and jet-lag hungry, I find myself standing by my cab, watching the driver walk the pavement peering at street signs and door numbers. Eventually, together, we find the entrance. It is a red lift door in a small, anonymous six-story apartment block. It looks like the kind of place where a woman with too many cats might live a life of quiet desperation. I take the lift to the third floor and discover that it is nothing of the sort. There is no old woman. There are no cats.

Instead I find food heaven. It is the restaurant at the end of the
universe. It is deliciousness in seventeen courses. I have found my way to Yukimura.

Clearly, in another life this was an apartment and the brightly lit, modest room I enter would have been the lounge. Half the space is filled by a three-sided blond-wood counter, seating nine people, which cuts off one corner. I mutter Hide Yamamoto’s name at a young woman in a black trouser suit, the only waiter in the place, and she smiles and nods. They are expecting me. I am shown to seat three on the bar, and the chef, Jun Yukimura, bows to me.

He is a cheerful, middle-aged man in a white jacket and a white triangular cap of the sort worn by burger flippers in American diners of the 1950s. His cap is set at a jaunty angle, and his hair is buzz-cut to a fuzz at the nape. He is accompanied by three young and earnest-looking cooks, who move between the preparation area at the bar and a kitchen in a room behind, talking in whispers. Jun is both chef and host. He jokes with his customers, offers up asides of wisdom and encouragement. Obviously I understand not a single word of this, but he has a mobile and animated face that supplies subtitles of its own. I smile a lot.

It begins. I am presented with a shiny square black plate bearing two slices of the sweetest raw scallop I have ever eaten, with some slivers of crisp pickled vegetables, golden grated crumbs of preserved sea cucumber roe, and a luscious white mayonnaise-like sauce. Next, a pot of a hot custard flavored with more of the sea cucumber roe, tasting ripely of the sea. Then a small emptied crab shell filled with leg meat and fish roe and a little light sugar syrup. There are slippery tender slices of raw venison, the color of a fresh hemorrhage, followed by tiny white vinagered fish, and then some pieces of cured mackerel with just-warm rice wrapped in crisp, toasted sheets of seaweed to be eaten by hand. There are small fish I do not recognize, cooked on the hibachi grill in the corner, the sweetness of which is undercut by the sudden, life-affirming bitterness of the guts. I am served some greaseless tempura, and a refreshing salad of mushrooms and greens and a steaming bowl of soup with silky bean curd and the sudden, nose-tickling hit of horseradish.

To one side of me a couple orders a bottle of Chassagne-Montrachet. On the other I am joined by a young man and an older woman, mother and son. Mr. Suzuki is in building management and is eager to test out his English. He offers me a glass of the DVX Mumm Cuvée Napa champenoise that they have brought with them for the occasion.

He says, “How do you come to be here?”

I explain that the executive chef of my hotel booked me in, that I am a writer investigating the restaurants of Tokyo. He looks impressed. I ask him why.

“I have never seen a foreigner here before. This is a very special place. You have to know about it to eat here.” This last seems a statement of the obvious, but I know what he means. As if to explain himself, he says, “You need to be recommended to come in, and it takes a long time to get a reservation.” He tells me he booked in over two months ago, but says that’s what you have to do if you want to taste the crab.

As he talks, one of the cooks places a whole pale pink beast a foot and a half across onto the counter, which, from the ridges on its shell and the long, spindly legs, looks like a species of spider crab. This is why everybody is here. This is what they have come for. The Zuwai-Gani, fished from the waters north of Kyoto, the city where Yukimura trained before coming to Tokyo in 2000, is only in season for a couple of months, and I am fortunate to be here just as that season is ending. I am ashamed that I had no idea about this, that I had simply rocked up in search of dinner.

The crab is sprouting a spume of shiny bubbles from somewhere around its mouth in a way that suggests it is still alive, but it doesn’t stay that way for long. It is cut up with two deft, quartering slices from a machete, dissected further, and the pieces placed on the hibachi, where they are cooked until the proteins have only just set. First there is a leg, then another; a claw, then a piece of the body. It is the richest white crabmeat I have ever tasted, with that curious balance of salt and sweet. The amount of meat that I scrape from the shell with chopsticks is slight, but hugely satisfying. At the end of the crab dishes, I am presented
with the main shell filled with a hot and powerful stew of the brown meat, which is so pungent, so savory, I want to run my finger around the edges to clean it out, though I resist the temptation.

Even then, I am not finished. I am given a little more of the sea cucumber roe that has been barbecued, to pump up the flavors of salt, sweet, and umami. There is a broth of finely sliced vegetables with ponzu zest (a kind of Japanese lemon), and some soupy rice, and then the sweetest, brightest lipstick-red strawberries with sake ice cream, and finally a lotus root jelly that tastes calmingly of tea.

At the end, Mr. Yukimura and I exchange cards that neither of us can read and he bows to me and, unself-consciously I bow back. I am presented with a bill for 37,000 yen—around £163 pounds ($334)—and drop the plastic onto the shiny lacquered plate, convinced I have landed a bargain. Mr. Yukimura accompanies me to the lift and out onto the street, where he bows again to indicate our journey together this evening is over. In one way, it occurs to me, a part of my journey is over, too. I may not have slept in thirty hours. I may have no idea where I am. But I have just eaten what may well be a perfect meal.

T
here are 60,000 restaurants in Tokyo. Or 120,000. Or 300,000. All of these numbers are quoted at me by one guidebook or another during my stay, but none is more revealing than the sight of the restaurants themselves. They are piled on top of one another, like children’s building blocks. They are crammed down the narrow side streets between skyscrapers, squeezed in along the major boulevards, secreted away in both the basements and uppermost floors of department stores. They are everywhere. The vast majority, obviously, are Japanese, and most of them offer just one style of cooking: here a tempura shop, there a sushi joint, over there a ramen bar. In the Japanese restaurant business the specialist is venerated over the generalist.

But this is also a city where you can eat the world with only a subway pass. I am told, for example, that there are 20,000 Italian restaurants in
Tokyo, from the simplest of pasta places to the Japanese outpost of Enotecha Pinchiorri, the famed Florentine gastro-temple. I come across American burger joints and English-style pubs, Spanish tapas bars and French brasseries. One afternoon I even pass a restaurant that announces on a big sign written in English, that it specializes in “Belarus Home Cooking,” which doesn’t strike me as something worth boasting about.

That the Belarussians should have decided to make a go of it in Tokyo is really no surprise. Since 1965, when the great French chef Paul Bocuse made his first tour of Japan, everybody has been trying to make a go of it here. Big-name European and American chefs have seen Japan as a land of opportunity, for which read “nice consulting deals.” Long before they had a presence in Las Vegas or Dubai they were in Tokyo, starting with Maxim’s of Paris, which opened on the ground floor of the Sony building in the midseventies. Maxim’s was followed by the Troisgros brothers, and later by ventures bearing the name of Bocuse himself, and many others besides.

Anybody with a passing knowledge of Japanese culture could quite reasonably have assumed that this influx of Western chefs would have left its mark upon Japanese cooking. The adoption of elements of foreign culture into Japanese life—or the concept of
iitoko-dori
, as it is known—has been so important to so much of the country’s development that it’s hard to imagine it not having an effect on the table. Certainly throughout its history Japan has taken various elements of other culinary traditions—the fermented soya bean and tea from China, the principles of tempura from the Portuguese—and made it their own.

Curiously, though, the impact of the latest culinary invasion has not been on the hosts but on the new arrivals. While Japanese diners might be some of the most adventurous in the world, Japanese cuisine has proved resistant to any further innovation from beyond its own shores; meanwhile, Western haute cuisine has filched things left, right and center, like dodgy guests filling their pockets with the silver spoons while the hosts are out the room. Some of it has been direct and obvious, like the “discovery” by Ferran Adria at El Bulli in Spain of seaweed extracts the Japanese had
known about for centuries, which could be used for making hot jellies (rather than the cold ones made from animal bone gelatines that melt above room temperature).

Others were more subtle. Since the early 1990s, when both Thomas Keller’s French Laundry opened in California’s Napa Valley and El Bulli came to prominence, the convention of the Western multicourse tasting menu has stretched from a mere six or eight courses to a dizzying fifteen, twenty-five, or even forty. Keller himself defined a philosophy to go with it—“With each course we want to strike quick, mean and leave without getting caught,” he wrote, like some Norman Mailer of the stove, in a mission statement for his staff—though in reality these menus simply aped the traditional Japanese meal system.

Joël Robuchon actively acknowledged the influence when he devised the L’Atelier format, which has since spread around the world, with its glossy black counter overlooking an open kitchen. In Europe it was easy to assume the primary influence to be the Spanish tapas bar, not least because a platter of the best hand-cut Iberico ham is always on the menu, but that’s simply because Robuchon likes his ham. A trip to L’Atelier in Tokyo’s Roppongi Hills quickly reveals the Japanese influence to be much stronger. In a meal pulled back to a succession of small tasting plates there is no space for the complex dishes of the grand old French kitchen, with their eight or ten elements. As with a Japanese dish, it becomes about showing each ingredient to its very best: a simple piece of Pyrenean milk-fed lamb, roasted and dressed with a little jus and nothing else, for example; a small but perfectly formed langoustine ravioli.