Rice, Noodle, Fish (14 page)

Hasao Nakahigashi grew up in a Kyoto
ryokan
, helping his parents with the cooking that forms a fundamental part of the traditional inn experience in Japan. Later he trained at Hyotei, the grandfather of all kaiseki in Kyoto, in operation since the early seventeenth century, before opening his own restaurant close to the Ginkaku-ji temple in 1992.

Nakahigashi is in his early fifties, with soft features and a gentle smile that exudes a sort of old-soul tranquillity. He wears not a chef's jacket but the white lab coat and tie favored by Kyoto's kaiseki masters. Every morning, before he puts on his coat and tie, Nakahigashi treks to the outskirts of Kyoto to pick vegetables and wild herbs from the hillsides and riverbanks. “The most important part of my cuisine is a strong sense of the season,” he says. “If you had to use one word to describe Japanese cuisine, it's
nature
.”

The restaurant has a floor made of small, smooth stones and a long polished cherrywood bar overlooking the open kitchen. The centerpiece of the room is a hulking orange
kamado
, a traditional wood-fired rice cooker, the same that
has been used for centuries to prepare Japan's sacred grain. As diners arrive, Nakahigashi loads up the rice and feeds the fire.

The meal begins the way all kaiseki meals begin, with
hassun
, a mixed plate of small bites—fish and vegetables, usually—used to set the tone for the feast to come. In a bowl of pine needles and fallen leaves he hides smoky slices of bonito topped with slow-cooked seaweed, ginkgo nuts grilled until just tender, a summer roll packed with foraged herbs, and juicy wedges of persimmon dressed with ground sesame and
sansho
flowers. Autumn resonates in every bite.

While the rice simmers away, the meal marches forward: sashimi decorated with a thicket of mountain vegetables and wildflowers; a thick slab of Kyoto-style mackerel sushi, fermented for a year, with the big, heady funk of a washed cheese; mountain fruit blanketed in white miso and speckled with black sesame and bee larvae. His skills with vegetables bear the mark of a man willing to hunt them down every day at dawn. “The vegetables tell me what to do,” he says. “When I pick up a daikon, it says, ‘Please bake me, please simmer me.'”

As the meal progresses deeper and deeper into the Kyoto wilderness, the anticipation for Nakahigashi's famous rice grows palpable among his patrons.

“Rice is sacred to the Japanese people,” he says. “We eat it at every meal, yet we never get tired of it.” He points out that the word for rice in Japanese,
gohan
, is the same as the word for meal.

When he finally lifts the lid of the first rice cooker, releasing a dramatic gasp of starchy steam, the entire restaurant looks ready to wave their white napkins in exuberant applause.

The rice is served with a single anchovy painstakingly smoked over a charcoal fire. Below the rice, a nest of lightly grilled matsutake mushrooms; on top, an orange slice of compressed fish roe. Together, an intense wave of umami to fortify the tender grains of rice.

Next comes
okoge
, the crispy rice from the bottom of the pan, served with crunchy flakes of sea salt and oil made from the outside kernel of the rice, spiked with spicy
sansho
pepper. For the finale, an island of crisp rice with wild herbs and broth from the cooked rice, a moving rendition of
chazuke
, Japanese rice-and-tea soup. It's a husk-to-heart exposé on rice, striking in both its simplicity and its soul-warming deliciousness—the standard by which all rice I ever eat will be judged.

米 麺 魚

Before you rush off to drop $300 on an eight-course kaiseki dinner, take this simple questionnaire:

■ When I eat out, I like to do so in a quiet, contemplative way.

■ I care a lot about the bowl my soup is served in.

■ I prefer subtle flavors to aggressive ones.

■ I am a big fan of negative space.

■ For me, eating is a form of meditation.

■ I am capable of feeling wonder at a single perfect ingredient.

■ I like to wander alone in the woods.

If you've answered yes to all the statements, congratulations, you have kaiseki in your DNA! Head directly to a very old, very serious restaurant and embrace the subtlety. A handful of affirmatives and you should book a table during your time in Kyoto and give it a shot. All nos? Save your money for sushi.

Regardless of your feelings on the form, the importance of kaiseki on Japanese culture cannot be overstated. Kaiseki draws on a diverse wellspring of influences, all of them intimately associated with the long, storied history of Kyoto itself.

In AD 789 the capital of Japan moved from Nara to Kyoto, where it remained
uninterrupted until 1869. For more than a millennium, all life flowed through Kyoto—all political maneuvering, all artistic creation, all of the country's best ingredients for consumption by the elite. This is where Ieyasu and Hideyoshi ruled; this is where Kabuki and geisha were born. Modern Kyotoites' sense of pride ruffles the feathers of many other Japanese, but for the people of Kyoto, the city's long-spanning reign serves as empirical evidence of its superiority:
When Tokyo has been capital of Japan for more than a thousand years, then we'll talk.

This sense of confidence stretches to all sides of Kyoto culture, but it's felt especially strongly in
kyo-ryori
, traditional Kyoto cuisine. You'll hear that the dashi is more elegant, the tofu more refined, the vegetables more dense with the flavors of Japanese terroir. If you listen closely, you will hear elaborate tales of ancient family traditions and heroic battles and extravagant courtly precedents that gave birth to Kyoto's status as one of the great eating cities of the world. Kyotoites may allow that Tokyo has a deeper overall food scene, if only for its size, but the belief of anybody born and bred on the food of the ancient capital is that Kyoto is ground zero for Japanese cuisine. And nowhere are its tenets and techniques better displayed than through kaiseki.

By the end of Kyoto's thousand-year run, kaiseki had emerged as the dominant cuisine for the local elite, with four principal branches reflecting the city's multilayered history: court cooking, a regal cuisine soaked in pageantry developed around the imperial presence during the early years of Kyoto's reign as capital;
shojin ryori
, vegan cooking, the humble yet elaborate meals formed around Buddhist-temple dining (
kaiseki
literally means “a stone in the stomach,” a reference to fasting Buddhist monks who used warm rocks to ward off hunger during the long, hard winters of meditation);
obanzai
, traditional home cooking that showcases the bounty of Kyoto, in
particular its vegetables; and, most important,
chakaiseki
, the cuisine of the tea ceremony, the fountain through which nearly all traditional Japanese culture flows.

Tea came to Japan from China around the same time Kyoto was settling into its role as the country's new capital. Back then, it was consumed primarily as a form of medicine, but in time it developed into an important social ritual, one that grew more elaborate and grandiose as the years went on.

Sen no Rikyu would change all that. Born in 1522 in the nearby port town of Sakai to a wealthy merchant father, he studied tea from an early age and rose quickly in the ranks of Kyoto's tea luminaries, going on to serve as tea master under Japan's two most powerful warlords at the end of the sixteenth century. Nobunaga Oda was one of Japan's fiercest and cruelest rulers, a man best known for his blatant and bloody disregard for history, tradition, and Japanese formalities. And yet he was a lover of the tea ceremony, the most formal and traditional of all Japanese endeavors, which he used as a civilized way to discuss politics. When Nobunaga was betrayed and killed in 1582, Rikyu's talents with tea were employed for a new boss: Hideyoshi Toyotomi, a former servant to Nobunaga who would go on to be one of Japan's three great unifiers.

During his time serving Hideyoshi, Rikyu began to reshape the dynamics of the tea ceremony. Building on the Japanese idea of
wabi-sabi
, appreciation for the imperfect and the inconstant, Rikyu worked to bring the tea ceremony back down to earth, to replace the ostentatious public ceremonies held by the Kyoto elite with private, reflective experiences designed to tease out in participants a deeper appreciation for the finer points of the moment—the shadows in a rock garden, the brushstrokes on a scroll, the gentle bitterness of the tea itself.

Rikyu achieved this by stripping away all nonessentials from the ceremony. He traded lavish halls for wooden huts, golden kettles for iron pots, elaborate ceramics for simple wooden cups. Free from fancy distractions, participants could achieve the deeper meditative state the tea ceremony was supposed to evoke.

Most students will spend decades studying and still not become official tea masters.

(Michael Magers, lead photographer)

In 1591 Rikyu's relationship with Hideyoshi turned sour. Some scholars speculate Hideyoshi grew resentful of Rikyu's growing influence in Kyoto; others point to a statue Rikyu erected of himself in Hideyoshi's compound as the source of the ruler's ire. Whatever the rift may have been, Hideyoshi ordered the grand tea master to commit seppuku, death by his own blade, which Rikyu did after serving up one last cup of tea to students and friends.

Four hundred years later, Rikyu is not only viewed as the father of the modern tea ceremony but he is also by extension one of the chief architects of kaiseki.

It has been said by more than a few smart people that to truly understand Japanese culture, you must first understand the Japanese tea ceremony. Packed into this single event you can experience the purest expression of the cornerstones of Japanese culture: flower and garden arrangements, calligraphy and scrolling, architecture and dress. And, of course, cuisine. Food became a part of the tea ceremony as a way to line the stomach before drinking strong beverages, but what started out as a light snack gradually grew to a meticulous multicourse feast.

Today kaiseki exists as a stand-alone experience, separate from the elaborate four-hour tea ceremonies that still take place in many corners of Japan, but appropriating many of the same aesthetic anchors—scrolls, flowers, rock gardens—to carry on Rikyu's enduring vision: an experience of gentle nourishment, a meditation on imperfection, a communion between man and nature.

米 麺 魚

The morning after the Nakahigashi dinner, I find Ken waiting in the lobby. “Well?”

“A beautiful meal from a beautiful man,” I tell him, before running through a few of the highlights. But he senses something in my voice, some distant reservation that even I don't register.

“But?”

“No buts. No, no. How could there be buts when there's a six-month waiting list? The rice was lovely. The guy is obviously a genius.”

He arches his eyebrows, cocks his head slightly.

“Okay, maybe there is something. I'm not really sure what it is, but it just feels like I'm missing something, like maybe I don't have all the pieces of the puzzle. Or maybe I'm just ill suited to kaiseki.”

We both stand there in the lobby in silence. Finally Ken speaks up.

“What are you doing tonight?”

“Why?”

“Be here at ten p.m. There's something I want to show you.”

A few ticks after ten, we're in a taxi heading west across Kyoto. Eventually we come to a river framed by a dark mass of mountains behind it. The taxi pulls up to a freestanding two-story wooden building, what looks like someone's riverside residence.

A family of four greets us at the door, bowing as we approach. Ken carries a gift from the Hyatt, little cakes and sweets from their pastry kitchen in impeccable packaging. “My favorite,” says the older man, as he bows to accept the gift and welcome his late-night visitors.

As we step inside the house, I realize that it's actually a restaurant, but it doesn't look like any of the kaiseki places I've eaten in before: small and creaky, with a handful of tables and a long counter—more an izakaya than a sanctuary for quiet reflection. The room smells of grilled fish and sesame oil, but there are no customers to be found. I see two sets of chopsticks, two sake glasses, and two stalks of bamboo set at the bar. We take a seat, and the old man and his son join two other cooks behind the counter. Packed inside the bamboo is a sorbet made from
shiso
, an herb with a
flavor somewhere between mint and basil, a bracing shotgun start. Ken gives a nod, and the procession begins.

We start with a next-generation miso soup: Kyoto's famous sweet white miso whisked with dashi made from lobster shells, with large chunks of tender claw meat and wilted spinach bobbing on the soup's surface.

The son takes a cube of topflight Wagyu off the grill, charred on the outside, rare in the center, and swaddles it with green onions and a scoop of melting sea urchin—a surf-and-turf to end all others.