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...

going wild with asparagi

Just as I was starting to have had enough of those big fat white asparagus spears — the season is about over now anyway — here come their country cousins, delicate asperges sauvages: "wild" French asparagus.

We've enjoyed them at home, simply steamed for a few minutes...

 

…and also around town. Here (below) they were served up as part of an excellent salad that also included fiddleheads, mangetouts, wild seri and more — together with slices of seared tairagi (aka tairagai/pen shell) clam.

I'll be posting more about this particular meal anon...

stray butterfly, crescent moon and stars

One of the sweetest memories of 2011. This was the penultimate course of the "Un souhait et la lumière" dinner menu at L'Effervescence, in Nishi-Azabu, as reviewed in my last Japan Times column.

It's also a teaser for my piece in the paper tomorrow...

 

 

gibiers and vino de mesa: les vinum still buzzes

We dropped by the opening of R2 Supper Club on Friday — staying only long enough for a single drink and then retreating in the face of the wall-to-wall crowds. But it put us in the mood for wine, and good food to go with it. So we decided to chance our luck at Les Vinum, a short taxi ride away in Nishi-Azabu. Most fortuitously, there were two free seats at the counter just waiting for us.

Plenty has changed at Les Vinum since I first discovered it and wrote it up, soon after it opened in 2005. It's now almost totally Western in feel — no chopsticks on the table; a bread basket is supplied; and very few Japanese side dishes. What hasn't changed is the buzz and enthusiasm in the compact unpretentious dining room. Hardly surprising: good wine and charcoal-grilled meats are one of the finest combinations in the book.

They have also kept their policy of offering a cluster of wines for ¥4,400, though the selection is rather smaller than in the past. We were more interested in the small list of recent arrivals chalked on the blackboard. One in particular caught our eye: Raices 1, a 1998 "super-vino de mesa" that's long been a favorite of ours.

Here's a close-up of the label for this rather excellent Spanish "Rhone clone" which is hard to get our hands on here these days...

There was a Japanese touch in our otoshi (obligatory starter): a demitasse of rich savory chawanmushi egg custard. This, though, was prepared from chicken stock rather than fish-based dashi. Steaming hot and appetizing, a great way to prime the taste buds and the stomach...

Our first starter was a chilled consomme jelly with fresh sashimi uni and small tender shrimp...

Our second was a hearty bouillabaisse-style fish soup, with cheese and spicy rouille...  

  

But those were just the preliminaries. The centerpiece of the kitchen is the charcoal grill, tended carefully and constantly by chef Saito, the no-nonsense grillmeister.

Right now he has a nice range of gibiers, over and above his usual menu, including pigeon and quail from Scotland. You can see some of the waterfowl hanging in an overhead closet.

We ordered up a cut of Ezo-jika (Hokkaido venison)...

It took an hour or so, cooked low-and-slow, carefully browning the outside and basting it with wine-rich jus... but leaving the meat inside lovely and red and rare...

Served with a compote of red cabbage and a gravy of that self-same jus, it was a perfect match with our wine..

Here's Les Vinum's web site...

brrrr... just the evening for a glug of hot grog

Comfortably subdued lighting; patina'd old furniture; a glass of hot spiced rum and a leisurely Havana...

You don't have to be a connoisseur of good rum to enjoy Tafia, in the back streets of Nishi-Azabu. In fact it's one of the best places in town to explore and discover the delights of the Caribbean's two finest exports. No stuffy snobbery here — in fact I'd say it's nice and chill, except that's not what we want at this time of year.

More in this piece in the JT by Nick Coldicott, though it doesn't give a web link. Not that there's much into on the Tafia home page...  But this is all you need to know:

2-15-14 Nishi-Azabu, Minato-ku // 港区西麻布2-15-14 // 03-3407-2219

And here's a map link...