Kasu-jiru: miso soup made with plenty of warming sake-kasu (the lees from sake-making).
In this case the sake in question is Tenryo daiginjo, brewed in the uplands of Gifu Prefecture. Which, not coincidentally, is the same sake we were drinking – warmed as atsukan, of course.
We need all the hearty sustenance we can get on these chilly late-February nights.
#粕汁 #まだ冬 #温かい #暖かい #温める
Noma Japan has opened! We went for lunch on Day 3 (January 12) and it was stupendous. What a setting, what a meal. And what a chef!
My feature introducing this remarkable, unprecedented project ran in The Japan Times earlier in the month. Now my review is out and you can read it here…
But this blog post represents the definitive blow-by-blow, course-by-course run-down of our meal. I'll be adding/fine-tuning the dish descriptions a bit more over the next few days, but here we go…
Please realize, this is not a definitive account of Noma Japan. That's because chef René Redzepi is already changing and adapting, evolving and swapping in new dishes.
I find that even a week later, I'm still thinking – still dreaming – of that exeptional banquet. For those unable to make it over here, please enjoy vicariously!
You can’t help but be wowed by that setting. From the 37th floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, you look out toward the distant hills and the unmistakable snow-capped, sunset-silhouetted cone of Mt. Fuji. It is hard to think of a more auspicious backdrop as you settle in for the three-hour, 16-course banquet.
That view is immediately forgotten, though, as soon as the floor staff start serving the food…
Course 1: The magic kicks in from the very first dish, jumbo shrimp served atop a platter of ice. They are superb, premium sashimi quality and so fresh they’re still dancing their final quivers.
But it is the seasoning – "flavors of the Nagano forest" the menu calls it – that defines this dish. A dozen tiny wild black ants are carefully arranged on the shrimp, their little pinpricks of sharp acidity acting as a perfect accent for the sweet, pink flesh.
Shima-ebi wth flavours of Nagano forest
"None of the other courses are as provocative, although ants are used so routinely at Noma, their presence should come as no surprise…"
Although the shrimp served on the day we were there were shima-ebi – a brace of them each – other varieties are also being used, depending on whatever is available on the day.
Course 2: Four varieties of citrus – bampeiyu (pomelo); mikan (mandarin orange); and two types of buntan (from Kochi) – adorned with pine salt, kinome (sansho leaf), slices of piquant Okinawan long peppers pickled in apple vinegar, dressed with an oil made from roasted Rishiri kombu seaweed.
Citrus and long pepper
Course 3: Monkfish liver that has been smoked, frozen and shaved onto crisp bread – from baguettes baked by the folks at Sucre Coeur in Osaka. You've never seen an-kimo like this before: outrageously good.
Shaved monkfish liver
We didn't get the wine pairing, but by this time we were ready for a glass or two. Starting with this one…
Course 4: Cuttlefish "noodles" in the style of zaru soba. Served chilled – "We just can't do that in Europe", says René, "people demand their food hot!" – they came with an iced broth of rose petals from Ishigaki (Okinawa).
Koika cuttlefish "Soba", with rose petal dip
Course 5: Clam pie. Premium shijimi (freshwater clams) shucked individually by hand and painstakingly arranged on a tart crust infused with kombu seaweed and seasoned with a sharply, deeply acidic paste derived from wild kiwi fruit (one of the chefs also mentioned grated wasabi in this, but it wasn't there for us).
Unbelievably intricate work... René told us that there are 45 to 50 of the clams per portion. And it takes 6-8 chefs over 4 hours to shuck and clean 7 kgs of the suckers, starting early in the morning. "We only do it because we think it's worth it" he told us...
Fresh water clam and wild kiwi
Course 6: Even René's take on tofu is a revelation. Freshly ground from organic beans, the soy milk is set with a special coagulant, steamed for 20 minutes and topped with dainty white morsels of walnut collected last fall from wild trees. There was a layer of miso and parsley sauce at the very bottom.
Tofu, just steamed with wild walnuts
Tofu will always taste like tofu. But this is some of the sweetest in all Japan.
Time for some sake: This was an amazing unfiltered, naturally feremented brew from Terada Honke, in Chiba.
Course 7: At this point sous-chef Thomas Frebel comes out and tells us he has a dish for us that they're still working on. No complaints whatsoever about being guineapigs for this experiment – especially since it involves uni (sea urchin)...
Sea urchin, maitake and cabbage
Inside the cabbage leaf, a generous serving of Hokkaido bafun uni, seasoned with a rich sauce made from maitake mushrooms and miso. Superb. A great contrast of textures, even if the central spine of the cabbage was a bit too fibrous.
Course 8: Probably the least spectacular of the dishes to look at (and the hardest to get a good image of). But it was undoubtedly one of the highlights.
Scallops dried for two days are made into a thick fudge, with beeswax "and a little bit of butter" (as served in CPH). But the Japan version gets an exta treatment: it gets aerated into a light, spongey texture. Underneath this there were crunchy little beech nuts (foraged in the autumn) and kombu seaweed oil, this one darker and richer than the kombu oil served with the citrus earlier. What a dish. This one blew us all away!
Scallop dried for two days, beech nuts and kelp
Course 9: Slivers of Hokkori pumpkin, a delectable variety of winter squash that was simmered with kelp and arranged on the plate with fronds of kombu seaweed and salted-dried cherry blossoms. This was served with a milky koji-based sauce accented with cherry tree wood oil. Definitely one of the prettiest of all the dishes. And one of the tastiest.
Hokkori pumpkin, cherry wood oil and salted cherry blossoms
Course 10: Then another jaw-dropper. Mysteriously beautiful, metallic shiny black leaves, which René just described to us as "origami garlic flowers". Of all the dishes, this was the one that brought it home just how much work had gone into this meal.
Garlic flower
They were made from black (fermented) garlic, were flecked with salt, and had a texture somewhere between liquorice and fruit leather. We just picked them up and nibbled… and nibbled… trying to pin down the flavour. It wasn't "garlicky" at all, but it did have hints of that rich allium sweetness you get when you cook down garlic low and slow. Intriguing. And so good!
Course 11: Preserved egg with root vegetables. Slices of lotus root; kuwai (a.k.a. three-leaf arrowroot); mukago (propagules of yama-imo yams); chorogi (Chinese artichoke). The egg yolk is "cured in beef" (now you know)…
Technically this was one of the best courses. In practice, it turned out to be a bit too substantial, sapping our appetite ahead of the main course. But each of these starchy corms added a bit too much heft to the meal, at a stage where we were just about to embark on the "main" dish. Nice gari-style ginger pickles with them, though, to perk up the palate.
Roots and starches with ginger
Sake part 2: Inemankai, from the community of Ine on the Tango Peninsula in northern Kyoto Prefecture. Sweetish, but with a nice clear acidity too. And a beautiful reddish tinge that comes from the akamai (red rice) they use to ferment it.
Course 12: Wild duck, caught by the traditional way, in nets. Then hung and dry-aged for three weeks, roasted and served whole – though already carved. Superb!
Wild duck and matsubusa berries
Beautiful flavorful flesh and firm texture. Nicely complemented with a dip prepared from wild matsubusa berries (aka Schisandra repanda)…
… and with our second wine of the meal.
Course 13: Turnip. "Cooked in yeast" was the initial explanation. But it went a lot deeper than that, involving the mycellium of cultivated shiitake. And a beautiful green broth made with parsley.
Yeast and turnip cooked in shiitake
Course 14: Rice and sake lees. The first of the dessert courses was also a standout. Crisp rice starch wafers, on a gelato of sake-kasu (lees), on a base of cooked mochi rice (sweet rice) – with a sauce prepared from foraged wood sorrel (oxalis), which is one of the wild herbs that were from the start a signature of Noma in CPH.
Rice
Course 15: Dessert part 2: yaki-imo sweet potato. Cooked down "just about all day" in raw sugar until amazingly caramelized. Best sweet potato ever.
Sweet potato simmered in raw sugar all day
It was served with a beautiful green dip, also from the wild kiwis (but sweeter and less acidic than the paste with the clam pie).
Course 16: The very final offering was a treat to the eyes as well as the taste buds. Fermented mushrooms, enrobed in chocolate. Served with little twigs of wild cinnamon to chew on with our Tim Wendelboe coffee. Minds and palates well and truly blown.
Wild cinnamon and fermented mushroom
This is more than a labour of love by René and his team. It's an insane, madcap project that is really pushing the envelope on what can be done with Japanese ingredients – and what the Noma team can achieve.
We were there on Day Three, and the effort and intensity that has gone into the project was clear on René's face as he worked alongside the wait staff, bringing us dishes, explaining the ingredients and the processes.
As I wrote in my review:
"Less than two weeks in and the menu is already evolving, as Redzepi adjusts and swaps in new dishes. By the time Noma Japan comes to a close (on Feb. 14), everything is likely to be even more finely honed.
"Even after that, the ripples from this bold, imaginative experiment will continue to spread. Redzepi sees this as a step to take Noma in Copenhagen to the next level. Meanwhile, here in Japan, a generation of chefs and customers have had their eyes and palates opened wide, beyond the confines of Japanese tradition.
"A magnificent success."
Team Noma hard at work…
… and then breathing out at the end of service: Head chef Daniel Giusti (right) and sous chef Junichi Takahashi. Great job guys!
And this was our menu:
PS: For another take on Noma Japan in a very different style, check out this fantastic review in emoji by Tejal Rao, who is the restaurant critic for Bloomberg.
On the plate, from left to right…
• Yama-uni tofu – tofu aged in miso so it evokes the look and texture (if not the taste) of uni urchin
• cream cheese aged in sake kasu (lees)
• egg yolk pickled in miso
Just a few of the interesting selection of chinmi tidbits on the menu at Kamozou in Kagurazaka.
In the glass, it's Kokuryu daiginjo; and in the kiki-choko that's Izumofuji Akimo hiya-oroshi.
There's plenty more like that on the menu…
…and in the fridge.
There are plenty more fine snacks and side dishes as well…
The Solamachi mall, right next to Tokyo Skytree, has several floors of restaurants, noodle counters and miscellaneous eateries. And the higher you rise, the fancier they get — and the more elevated the prices.
Those on the top (31st) floor command the best vistas, past the tower to the city, the sunset and, if you're lucky, Mt.Fuji on the far horizon. So they can charge the most. Expect set meals at this altitude to start from around ¥8,000.
Shokkan is only one floor down but it looks to the north, over the sprawl of the low city. The view is still none too shabby, especially after night falls. But it does mean menu prices are going to be slightly more affordable.
As I write in my Japan Times piece, if you don't have seats booked in advance, it's best to get there for opening time, which is 5 pm. You may not score a coveted window table, but there are likely to be a couple of spots open at the counter looking into the open kitchen.
Besides getting to watch the knife skills of the itamae chefs – and even at this level, it's pretty impressive – another advantage of being here is that you can see the dishes as they go out and ask for any that you don't see on the menu.
That was how we homed in on the yuba rolls. The sheets of fresh yuba were laid out and the itamae was filling them with crabmeat and wakame seaweed. That was good enough for us to put in an order.
It was even better than we expected, as it came topped with a gelée of ponzu (a mix of rice vinegar, shoyu and dashi), a garnish of myoga and a wedge of sudachi.
One of the Shokkan signature dishes – here as at the original Shokkan in Shibuya – is raw vegetables with the trademark tomato-miso dip. Here the crudites, a colorful selection of leaves, stems and roots, are served in a wooden masu (sake drinking "box").
To the Western palate, this combination of acidic-sweet with savory-salty miso seems like a no-brainer. It's not just addictively tasty, it has that festive reddish-orange hue. But even now in Japanese cuisine it is considered rather daringly leftfield (much as the tomato shabushabu is at Basara).
The Shokkan main menu is available in full in clear, accurate English.
(click on them to enlarge)...
And so too the sake menu. But not the slender sheet that lists the specials of the day. This, though, is well worth exploring (if you can bridge the language divide) if you feel like settling in for a leisurely izakaya-style session with sake to sip on...
From here we spotted the oysters on the halfshell – jumbo specimens flown down from Hokkaido (the beer is Yebisu Kohaku, a flavorful lager; they also have Shirohonoka, a version of witbier);
the plump juicy shio-yaki iwashi (salted-grilled sardine);
and the ni-anago aburi (conger eel, simmered and then grilled), with its dab of savory sansho relish…
There was plenty else to try, but we had had our fill of good sake and it was time for the rice course.
The house specialty is kama-meshi — rice cooked in a pot and topped with various choice ingredients. Our choice was salmon with uni urchin and ikura roe, and a garnish of mitsuba leaf. Very tasty and filling.
There is a larger, slightly more deluxe version of this kamameshi, which is prepared in a claypot donabe. Prepared with tiny dried sakura-ebi shrimp and topped with asari clams, small mussels and generous amounts of ikura salmon roe, this is the dish Shokkan has (only half tongue in cheek) called its “famous seafood paella" – and that's the illustration at the top of my JT column on Shokkan.
"By this time, night will have fallen, and the glitter of the low-lying city below will be matched by the lights reflected in window glass from the open kitchen. With the effects of the sake kicking in, everything takes on a very cheerful glow."
Thierry Marx is in town. And he's brought his chopsticks with him.
This week — through Sunday (the 23rd) — the Parisian chef is preparing a selection of the dishes that have propelled his double-Michelin-starred restaurant, Sur Mesure inside the Mandarin Oriental Paris, to the centre of the gastronomic map of the French capital.
Despite his long connection with Japan — first through his life-long practice of judo, then through his deep passion for Japanese cuisine — Marx is not a well known name here. That deserves to change. He is one of the new generation of chefs who have brought modernist techniques and an acceptance of other countries' cuisines into the Michelin mainstream. Not without attracting criticism from the old guard, but effectively silencing the naysayers through the quality of his cooking.
Since I'm not planning to be in Paris for the foreseeable future — though actually, these days the foreseeable is never too distant — this was far too good an opportunity to miss. So I made my way up to Restaurant K'shiki, on the 38th floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Nihonbashi, intrigued to see how dinner was.
The answer: very good indeed. This was how it unfolded…
• The setting: K'shiki is nice, serious but not too plush, with a great view out of those floor-to-ceiling windows towards the evening light over the western hills.
• The appetizer: a light mousse of nishin (herring) blended with fine-diced apple and onion and lightly crunchy pink tobiko roe, topped with a sorbet of smoked herring (kunsei), served with a "crouton" wafer.
This was a great way to open dinner, with just enough umami and saltiness to prime the taste buds. Really good.
• The starter: "tube pizza" w/ stalk caper
• The 2nd starter: yari-ika (squid) and asparagus.
The centerpiece was the croustillant, a battered/deep-fried cube of creamy squid mousse, served with white asparagus coated with squid ink; a line of yari-ika powder reminiscent (in flavour) of the cuttlefish snacks served with beer at Japanese seaside resorts; with yari-ika emulsion; foam of the same squid with lemon zest; and a dainty blob of red chili sauce providing a counterpoint of both colour and flavour.
• The fish course: hirame (turbot / flounder); caramelized onion; cauliflower puree; and citron sauce.
The fillet of flounder, landed in Aomori, was perfectly tender but firm, with none of the flabbiness I associate with sous-vide cooking. The sheet of caramelized onion had a vinegar tartness to balance the sweetness; the cauliflower also had a tartness, but from citrus; and the sauce was introduced as being made with natsu-mikan, but I'd go with the French description, citron cédrat.
Unfortunately, the light was fading badly by now. And while the semi-darkness of the K'shiki dining room makes for intimacy, it does not favour photography. My photo just doesn't do the dish justice, so underneath I've added one of the press release pictures.
• The meat course: boeuf charbon; chickpea; aubergine gnocchi; chard emulsion; chickpea purée; aka-miso sauce.
• The first dessert: Saint-Honoré with caramelized profiteroles so sweet they could not be balanced by the citrus ice cream. (another "official" photo as mine were too washed out…
• The 2nd dessert: miroir cassis.
This one really hit the spot and left all the right lingering notes in the mouth: dark rich cassis on a bed of pannacotta; a blackcurrant milk chocolate ball; spheroids of liquid cassis; lemongrass foam.
And that — apart from the coffee and petit fours (which were not from Paris) — was it. Not a major tasting menu of complexity, but skillfully woven classic yet modernist gastronomy accented with subtle surprises.
As I said before, very good indeed. In fact, highly recommended.
Full details of the menu are on the K'shiki website here…
Food writer and restaurant reviewer for the Japan Times contact: foodfile (at) me (dot) com
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