The New Food Capital Of The World

Naturally, all the fuss has only made the public more interested. The first 90,000 copies of the Japanese edition sold out within 24 hours of publication—roughly the same number of sales that the New York guide got in its first year. And even though the book was published in November, it still ended up as a best seller for 2007. "It was like the debut of the latest 'Harry Potter'," says Naret with a laugh.

And why not? It's no exaggeration to say that the Japanese are crazy about their food. About a third of all TV broadcasts in Japan are devoted to the subject—from simple cooking shows to taste-test guessing games featuring blindfolded celebrities. Tokyo has 160,000 restaurants, compared with 13,000 in Paris. Japanese foodies happily stand in line for hours to garner sample delicacies or coveted restaurant seats. Japan food bloggers are hugely prolific, cataloging their meals in painstaking detail (and, often, with cell-phone photos). One housewife whose blog documents her quest for the country's best bread proudly notes that she's visited 384 bakeries in the city of Kobe alone.

Japan's restaurants reflect this obsession. Consider Sukiyabashi Jiro, which was already one of Tokyo's most famous sushi spots before Michelin gave it three stars for reasons that have nothing to do with starched tablecloths. Its 82-year-old owner, Jiro Ono, has spent the past 50 years perfecting his technique. "I've only been there once but I was stunned," says restaurant critic Jun Yokokawa. "It's the ultimate sushi." Ono meticulously controls the temperature of each type of fish he uses, in order "to bring out the best in each," and is famous for wearing gloves whenever he leaves the restaurant, even in summertime, to make sure he never loses his magical feel for fish.

His restaurant is all about the food; if you need to use the amenities, you'll have to go next door. Just because Ono got three stars, notes Michelin's Naret, he's unlikely to add toilets any time soon. "He's not going to put carpet on the floor, he's not going to put money into chandeliers. He's still going to invest in the best product, cutting the fish in a way you'll never see anywhere else."

There are many explanations for Japan's astounding fascination with food. Though the fact is often obscured by Japan's present prosperity, it's only been a generation or two since many people here still went hungry. Now that they have the means, modern Japanese indulge by building on deeply rooted traditions of obsessive craftsmanship and nature worship. Ingredients, and the seasons, are everything. At two-star Kikunoi, the water to make fragrant dashi broth is trucked in several times a week from a well owned by the restaurant's parent establishment in Kyoto. The bonito flakes that flavor the soup come from fish caught off the southern island of Kyushu and are carefully sliced to a thickness of one third of a millimeter. Another ingredient, top-quality kombu kelp from Hokkaido in the north, is dried in temperature-controlled storage, then in the open air, for more than a year before it makes it to Tokyo. "We try to use ingredients that are the best, superior to anything else available," says owner and head chef Yoshihiro Murata.

This is the ethic instructors strive to inculcate at Tokyo's elite Tsuji Culinary Institute—whether the cuisine at hand is elegant classical kaiseki or contemporary European. Students start off by learning how to stand properly in the kitchen while using a knife. There's no moving on to more-refined topics until they've mastered the proper way to cut vegetables, and some critics have compared the rote movements to martial-arts training. "You have to be so accurate when you slice ingredients," says Yuka Kakuta, 25. "I couldn't do it at first." Aspiring chefs also have to memorize everything from countless brands of rice and miso (soybean paste) to the myriad types of plates and bowls that go with different sorts of food. "There are plates that cannot be used during certain seasons," says Tsuji professor Kiyoshi Mitsuzono. "I tell my students to study [Japanese cuisine] just as you would study painting or music." The challenge seems all the more daunting considering that the Japanese notion of prime season, or shun, can be as fleeting as a week; bamboo shoots, for example, have a shun of just 10 days.

That sort of intensity surprises foreigners but has placed Japan at the cutting edge of world cuisine. "In Japan they take huge steps in choosing ingredients at the peak of flavor," says Alain Verzeroli, the head chef at Joël Robuchon, one of three French restaurants in Tokyo that got three stars. Verzeroli, who treats customers to Breton lobster and melt-in-your-mouth canard de Challans, heads an all-Japanese staff that includes several graduates of Tsuji's French campus, located just outside Lyon. Verzeroli pays particular credit to the connoisseurship of Japan's wine lovers—another surprise for outsiders—who have a knack for finding the world's best and importing it at reasonable prices. And he's found Tokyoites to be so interested in his restaurant that he's started offering a series of cooking demonstrations, where customers are invited to the kitchen to watch him prepare simple dishes that they can then sample in the restaurant.