Japan - Pictures on a Plate

As dusk turned to night and the red lights on Tokyo’s skyscrapers started blinking, there was a knock at the door. Room service had arrived and with it one of the best Japanese meals I’ve ever tasted. We opened gleaming lacquered boxes to reveal sushi and sashimi looking like a picture on a plate. Parcels of fish lay on beds of leaves, each delivering a different taste sensation.

This was traditional kaiseki cuisine from the Michelin starred restaurant, Hanasanshou in the Park Hotel. Prepared by chief chef Yoshiaki Takada, all the food is created using fresh seasonal ingredients from a farming family in Kyoto who have been growing vegetables for over 400 years. Freshness is key and it can’t be a bad thing that the hotel is only ten minutes from the world’s largest fish market, Tsukiji. Here you can get sushi for breakfast from 5.30 in the morning and watch the buying and selling. Bluefin tuna are lined up on wooden pallets selling at around £80 a kilo in the auction.

Once the sale is made the fish is on its way to a kitchen. Freshness is everything in Japan. So much so that you can easily find yourself eating raw fish from the bone as the head is still breathing. While this is may be a bit too much for non-Japanese tastes, it’s a testament to Japanese food that it’s now a popular alternative in most Western countries.

'Freshness is everything in Japan. So much so that you can easily find yourself eating raw fish from the bone as the head is still breathing.'

In the West we have a preoccupation with food and health. Every week there’s a new diet. Articles tell us what’s good to eat and what’s arrived onto the forbidden list. What you can eat one week suddenly becomes a no-no the next. It’s little wonder that we have a strange relationship with food and that the pleasure of eating is tinged with guilt. Not so for the Japanese who enjoy their food without the risk of obesity, and have the longest life expectancy in the world. They have the lowest risk of heart-related disease among developed nations and a low incidence of menopausal symptoms. Add to that the fact that breast cancer is rare, and it would be an unusual person who didn’t start wondering if diet was a contributory factor to all these pluses.

In Japan food is an art form. It echoes the four seasons and has five principles which are bound up with nature and in turn by Shinto belief and Buddhism. The Japanese use the word ‘washoku’ to distinguish their food. The philosophy of washoku is encapsulated by the five principles: five colours, five tastes, five senses, five outlooks and five ways of cooking. These cover meal preparation and the sensual and spiritual elements. It’s about balancing tastes and colours, being stimulated by the all the senses and finding spiritual nourishment as well as physical satisfaction. Most importantly it’s about respecting the seasonal cycle and the rhythms of nature.

Not surprisingly there are five essential seasonings in Japanese food. These are soy sauce, miso paste, rice vinegar, sake and mirin, which is a sweet cooking sake. Other basics in the Japanese larder are bonito fish flakes, kelp seaweed, dried shitake mushrooms, seven-spice seasoning, green horseradish, noodles, sesame seeds, pickled ginger and potato starch. Pickled plums and yuzu, which is a citrus fruit that looks like a tangerine and has a minty flavour, are also staples.

The Japanese have a long relationship with fish, and as you might expect, this forms the basis of their diet. You can eat in restaurants where you pick your fish fresh from the tank. Or spend a small fortune on the famous fugu or pufferfish. A chef takes three years to learn how to prepare this fish. In the hands of a novice it’s poisonous and 32 times more deadly than ingesting cyanide.

But if fish isn’t for you, there are tasty meat dishes. Take chicken yakitori. This uses pieces of chicken threaded onto skewers. They’re marinated in a mixture of soy sauce, sake, mirin, sugar and shichimi togarashi, the seven-spice seasoning. Grilled they make the perfect snack. Miso soup is always a good standby and in Japan features at all meals. It can seem more like a hot drink than a soup and is very satisfying. The miso at the Park Hotel was so dense with flavour I wanted to be able to bite into it to make the flavours last.

'In the hands of a novice [the fugu, or pufferfish is] poisonous and 32 times more deadly than ingesting cyanide.'

Perhaps the most well known meat would be Kobe or Wagyu beef. This comes from black Tajima-ushi breed of Wagyu cattle reared according to strict traditional methods in the Hyogo Prefecture in Japan. Once you’ve tasted Kobe no other meat will do. Eaten as a steak, it’s so tender that the knife simply slides through its distinctive fatty well-marbled texture. These cattle are indulged with sake, beer, and grain, and massaged and brushed. It’s this tender care that gives the meat its prized flavour.

Rice, noodles and soy are all staples of the Japanese diet, but Western dishes have also influenced the menu. Beef stew and hamburgers are just two examples of what are known as yoshoku dishes, and have become completely Japanized. However while Japan has embraced some of the West’s cooking, it’s now the rest of the western world that’s taking to Japanese food in droves. Scan the restaurant listings in cities such as New York and London and you’ll be spoilt for choice. There’s everything from take-away to fine dining. Restaurants with names like Bento, Itsu, Samurai and Wasabi are popping up on street corners everywhere. And of course Nobu, now a chain of 22 restaurants in 18 different cities around the world from Dubai to Athens.

Founded by chef Nobuyuki Matsuhisa, who has won culinary honours and Michelin stars, his dishes elevate Japanese food to one of the great cuisines. Matsuhisa has created his own style of Japanese food, a passion that developed from a visit to a sushi restaurant with his brother when he was a young boy. His signature dishes include sashimi salad with matsuhisa soy sauce dressing, hamachi salad with jalapenos, squid ‘pasta’ with light garlic sauce and black cod in miso.

For spicy, flavoursome healthy food, Japanese dishes can’t be beaten. The food is designed with chop sticks in mind, so there’s no reason not to use them. Hot sake makes a good accompaniment. And green tea which pops up in everything from savoury dishes to ice-cream is a good alternative. Best of all the food is fresh and seasonal; you’ll feel full quicker and when you leave the table those distinctive taste sensations will still be bouncing around your palate.

www.parkhoteltokyo.com 
 
www.noburestaurants.com

By Michele Nevard