tokyo food file

al fresco lunch at Cucina 13 Aprile — the full post

It's all about the setting. Screened from the sun by a wide parasol and surrounded by shrubbery, you settle in sipping Prosecco and nibbling on focaccia. Ensconced in this oasis of calm, you might almost forget you're just steps away from the Nishi-Azabu Crossing, with its looming expressway flyover and ceaseless roar of traffic.

Inside is nice, with its whitewashed walls, scrubbed wood floors and well-patinated wooden chairs drawn up to crisp white tablecloths. But that outside table is really where it's at. A nice touch: your name inscribed on an ivy leaf to mark your reservation...

 

As nibbles: focaccia and other breads with some good olive oil to dip them in...

Starter #1: Cipolla spuma, prosciutto e pomprori [sic] — fruit tomatoes, from the market in Kamakura; Parma prosciutto; and a foam of fresh (and lightly sweetened) cream...

 

Starter #2: That excellent salad with slices of seared tairagi/tairagai. The salad itself is an eclectic mix of wild greens and herbs, including mange-tout peas, seri, ice plant, a couple of strands of wild asparagus and a single fiddlehead fern. Together with this you get several slices of the shellfish, like a coarser, meatier, country-cousin version of hotate scallops, anointed with a lively dressing of horseradish, mustard and shallots. For an antipasto, it's a substantial serving — and very attractively "plated" on the massive black triangular shell of the very same clam.

 

The pasta course: first up the trofie: small circles of dough rolled up into fat strings a couple of centimeters long — which he serves all'arrabbiata in a rich sauce prepared from fruit tomatoes. Remarkably sweet, and only very lightly piquant, it contains generous amounts of the delicate meat from kegani horsehair crabs.

 

Second, the gnocchi all fave: The broad beans, crushed and mixed with the dough, give the gnocchi an extra smoothness of texture as well as a distinctive dark-green hue. Served with creamy white ricotta cheese and crisp curls of salty pink guanciale (pork jowl bacon), it's not just a great mix of flavors — it's the quintessential Italian color combination.

 

And as a main course, a very tasty fillet of pan-fried amadai with very lightly cooked hamaguri clams. Like everything Chef Hidaka prepares, very attractively presented...

 

Dessert 1: biancomangiare with grappa-infused gelato...

 

Dessert 2: fresh mango served on a mango sorbet, imbued with plenty of vanilla... 

 

Bottom line: a great setting, delicately prepared Tokyo-Italian cucina, and a warm sense of it being a family-run operation. 

The full review is up in my Japan Times column here...

And the Cucina 13 Aprile web site is here...

hiramasa: a rare yellowtail

We see plenty of yellowtail (seriola) species at our local fish market. There is usually buri or hamachi (amberjack); ready supplies of kampachi (almaco jack), and almost always some cultured shima-aji (striped jack).

But far more unusual is hiramasa (yellowtail amberjack), especially caught from the open seas. We snapped up a quarter-fillet. It's a firm-fleshed fish that makes excellent sashimi.

And here it is on the plate. A rare treat.

oysters on the half-shell with sake: a classic winter combination

A few nama-gaki oysters: Hokkaido (on the left) and Matoya (Mie; right)... a plate of lightly steamed eggplant, very unseasonal but a year-round favourite; and a bowl of nira-tamago (think of runny scrambled eggs with plenty of green onions)...

...a whole saba mackerel himono (love those R2D2 shoyu dispensers)...

...and a snifter or two of some nifty nihonshu. Starting (and ending too, it must be said) with the ever-ace Tamagawa... 

 

The location: Shutoan, a simple basement with a modest menu and a truly remarkable selection of sake.

Their web site is here... 

a kaiseki chef at work — musings (and images) from the counter at Uchiyama

As satisfying as the chakaiseki cuisine is at Uchiyama, I must confess to deriving almost as much pleasure from merely being there as I do from the eating.

There is something I find deeply inspiring — nourishing, you could say — about simply sitting at a handsome timber counter of well scrubbed cedar, observing the chefs at work. The calm precision of their moves; the way they respect each other's space, their steps appearing almost choreographed; and above all, the expertise of their knifework.

On this day, Chef Uchiyama was out, supervising his then-shortly-to-open second restaurant. But his second-in-command, Kono-san, takes care of everything most ably. Besides keeping an eye on all 11 customers at the counter, and making sure everything is being served correctly, his main duty is to slice the sashimi. While I sipped my sake and nibbled on the contents of my bento-bako, I was able to sit back and watch as he filleted the madai for the chazuke.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Year flavors — ozoni, yaki-tai and toshikoshi soba

It's always a happy new year for me if I can start the day with ozoni.

We don't follow any precedents or handed-down recipes: we're outsiders, we don't have to. Each year we adjust the ingedients and ratios. It really doesn't matter what foods you use in your ozoni as long as a) the dashi is good; and b) there's some mochi lurking at the bottom of your bowl. 

This year the dashi was prepared from ne-kombu and premium katsuo-bushi. The miso was white Yamari from Kyoto, a lovely creamy miso that's neither too salty nor too sweet. The mochi was made yesterday by our neighbourhood wagashi artisan, still soft and pliable and puffing up effortlessly under the grill before being added to the mix.

Also in the bowl: sake-grilled buri (yellowtail); a slice of Miura daikon; slivers of kyo-ninjin carrot; a big fat fresh shiitake; and a few leaves of young komatsuna and nanohana greens.

And I feel positively celebratory if there's tai (snapper/sea bream) on the table too.

Ours — the smaller of the two below — was freshly salt-grilled (shio-yaki) by our local fishmonger on his curb-side charcoal grill.

 

And yes, we did see out the old year with the usual toshi-koshi soba. It's just that the photos didn't turn out so well. We'd already laid into the nihonshu by the time we ate them. But this is what the noodles looked like straight out of their cute little package (love that photo of the buckwheat plants in bloom) fresh from our local te-uchi sobaya...

 

 

 

 

 

 

Top noodles — delicate and aromatic, hand-rolled and chopped, of course — packed with wonderful rich savoury tsuyu dipping sauce, along with twists of freshly grated wasabi and pink-tinged Himalayan rock salt.