Finding Poetry On Your Plate

Spend a night out in Tokyo and you'll be treated to a celebration of Japan's obsession with, well, obsession. That cultural fission that makes the Japanese wrap presents with particular grace, play jazz with uncanny precision, practice Zen with an austere purity: this is the soul on sale at the country's best restaurants. Some of Japan's most dazzling food at the moment is Italian, French, Chinese and Spanish. These days it's not uncommon for Japanese chefs to move to Italy and France in their early 20s and spend a decade polishing their skills. Everything they cook and taste abroad, however, is taken in through eyes cast quietly homeward. "I always wondered," one friend of mine who cooks in a Tokyo restaurant told me, "what Piedmontese risotto would taste like with mushrooms from Niigata." The dish surprises, not only with the sharp taste of fresh coastal mushrooms, but with a near-honeyed sweetness teased from the first-harvest rice. To find that sweetness cut by a glass of iced and bitter sake only reinforces the reminder that rice, after all, came to Italy from Asia. Every bite shows how Japan's instinctive feel for perfection works itself out in taste, in dishes that are not improvements or localizations of the original, but somehow different and amazing.

Enter a restaurant like Aronia de Takazawa, where the young chef has likely personally caught your fish or picked your zucchini blossoms, and you slip past the cool veneer of modern Japan—a veneer offputting to many Westerners—and into the real warmth of the culture. Japan is known to be inaccessible to foreigners, but during the countless nights I've spent there, I've never found it less than warm and welcoming. And I think that this may be because I've always approached Japan through its food.

There is something much more profound going on than mere eating in Japan. Bite by bite, I have approached that part of Japanese culture that is supposedly most remote and removed, the part where real passion expresses itself. What those Michelin inspectors recently discovered, what they found so much more abundant in Tokyo than in Paris, was what I have found as well: food that is very like Myoe's moonlight on that snowy night, the best possible spiritual companion. The old Zen priest, you begin to think after a few Tokyo dinners, would have been right at home in front of a steaming plate of Niigata mushroom risotto. The only difference between him and me is that he'd probably have given you the address.

Ramo is managing director of Kissinger Associates.

© 2008