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2004 January 07

Flavors Fresher Than Sushi
By JULIA MOSKIN

NEW YORKERS have long believed that a credit card, an open mind and the wit to
put yourself in the hands of a great sushi master are a sure route to
understanding Japanese cuisine.

But with a burst of restaurant openings that began last fall and shows no sign of
abating, New York is undergoing a crash course in Japanese flavors that goes
well beyond sushi and soba. Learning to choose among maguro, chutoro and
otoro grades of tuna is, it turns out, the tip of the iceberg. We now live in a world
of sansho and shishito peppers, griddled takoyaki (octopus balls), crisp
okonomiyaki (vegetable fritters), fine aged sakes with the richness of oloroso
sherry, handmade gyoza dumplings and organic artisanal tofu.

Japanese cooking in New York now is where French cooking was in the
mid-1970's: on the verge of a major breakthrough in quality and authenticity.
Thirty years ago, French restaurants in New York all served pretty much the
same menu — onion soup, fillet of sole and chocolate mousse — and as far as
most of us knew, that was French cooking.

For 2004, Japanese is the new French. In New York's top restaurants, it's no
longer possible to ignore Japanese ingredients like miso and ponzu: they pop up
as often as mustard and parsley. Japanese cuisine is revealing its true scope;
regional specialties, obscure ingredients, unexpected influences and restaurant
options, from street food to superdeluxe.

Why Japanese, why now? "The food has always been here," said Yuriko Kuchiki,
a Japanese journalist who has lived in New York for 13 years. "The change is that
Americans are eating more like the Japanese — seasonal ingredients, small
plates, more fish and vegetables." Marcus Samuelsson of Aquavit, whose first
new venture in years is Riingo, a Japanese-American experiment expected to
open next week, said: "The New York chefs I know have always been obsessed
with Japanese food. It's a challenge, because it's so different."

Tadashi Ono, a Tokyo native who built his legend combining French technique
with subdued Japanese flavors at La Caravelle through the 1990's, decided to
return to a basic Japanese menu at Matsuri, which opened last year on West 16th
Street. "I learned so much from cooking French all those years," Mr. Ono said.
"But then I thought, do I really have to work so hard? It takes a long time to
make stock. It takes a long time to make a sauce."

Two other top Japanese chefs, Noriyuki Sugie (Asiate) and Masa Takayama
(Asayoshi), are just opening splashy New York restaurants. Koji Imai, Japan's
answer to Drew Nieporent (spiked with Alice Waters's ingredient obsession), is
expanding his empire to TriBeCa with the 285-seat Megu, having taught a
community of Amish farmers in Ohio to grow edamame to his exact
specifications. Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin directed the menu at Geisha, a
glamorous new fantasy-Japanese lounge with an ambitious kitchen, and a
newcomer, Josh DeChellis (ex Union Pacific), is making his name at Sumile with a
menu devoted entirely to Japanese flavors.

For years, New York chefs have respectfully worshiped Japanese cooking at
authentic shrines like Honmura An, Omen and Sushi Yasuda. With its strict rules
about flavor balance, visual harmony, seasonality and presentation, plus its
lengthy apprenticeship and formidable language barrier, traditional Japanese
cuisine has preserved its mystique among chefs and diners.

But several forces have combined recently to crack that mystique wide open.
Since 1991, Nobuyuki Matsuhisa has paved the way for a mass audience for
Japanese flavors at Nobu, and chefs like David Bouley, Rocco DiSpirito and Gary
Robins have been chipping away for years at the notion that Japanese food is
about raw fish and ramen.

On a more global scale, a weakening dollar and active recruiting of Japanese
students by New York art schools like the School of Visual Arts have brought a
large, trendsetting, young Japanese community to Manhattan. The East Village
and East 40's are dotted with new shops devoted to Japanese snacks like
kushikatsu, skewers of deep-fried asparagus and lotus root; curry pan, a mildly
spicy sweet roll so ubiquitous in Japan that it is sold at every Starbucks; and
omusubi, fist-size rice balls that are the Japanese equivalent of New York's
buttered bagel. On St. Marks Place, a row of izakaya, boisterous Japanese pubs
associated with drinking and youth culture (that traditionally do not serve sushi),
is packed every night. Japanese fashion, design and technology haven't been this
chic since the 1980's; throw the Internet into the mix and the connection between
New York and Tokyo has never been closer.

According to Robb Satterwhite, a New Yorker who lives in Tokyo and publishes
an English-language guide to Tokyo restaurants on the Web, menus that mix
Western and Japanese flavors are just as common in Tokyo as in New York.
"Yuzu and caviar, foie gras and pickled radish, those kinds of combinations are
hugely trendy here right now," Mr. Satterwhite said in a phone interview last
week. Overall, the cultural cross-pollination that has made American steakhouses
and French bakeries popular in Japan means that Japanese cuisine, even in
Japan, is more loosely defined than ever.

To shake up your notions of authentic Japanese food, there's no better place to
start than Otafuku on East Ninth Street, a storefront sliver equipped with a single
griddle. Otafuku fries Manhattan's crispest okonomiyaki, a browned pancake of
shredded cabbage, carrot and ginger held together with an ethereal batter and
embedded with chunks of squid, tiny shrimp or thin-sliced pork belly. Otafuku's
cooks also make fresh takoyaki, puffs of eggy batter studded with octopus and
scallion, turning them constantly with a toothpick as the crust turns a rich golden
brown. Both snacks are garnished with katsuobushi, feathery pink flakes of dried
fish; a smoky-sweet brown sauce; and lashings of mayonnaise, an American
import that has become ubiquitous in Japanese fast food.

A few doors down, the cheerful Panya bakery seems like a New York hybrid,
offering a perfect pain au chocolat alongside croissants stuffed with azuki beans,
and seaweed-wrapped bread rolls filled with spicy tuna. But according to its
manager, Noriyuki Tajima, Panya could exist in any modern Japanese city. Bread
and pastry, though nonexistent in traditional Japanese kitchens, are now
completely assimilated. "French patisserie is considered the most elegant, but the
most popular dessert in Japan is tiramisù," he said, pointing out the green tea
version that is the bakery's most popular dessert.

And bread crumbs — or panko — are integral to the popular Japanese art of
deep frying; Win49 on the Lower East Side specializes in kushikatsu, vegetables,
meat and even fish speared on a skewer, dipped in panko and fried crisp.

On weekend nights, St. Marks Place is crowded with young people, Japanese and
not, prowling a row of izakaya where the food is less alluring than the scene and
the shochu, a clear, vodkalike spirit that can be flavored with shiso or plum or, in
a recent Tokyo fad, infused with nicotine. Izakaya Taisho specializes in enormous
platters of yakitori: grilled chicken wings, skin, livers and meat on bamboo
skewers; at night, Go's owner sets up an outdoor griddle on the sidewalk and
cooks yatai specials, Japanese street food that his 20-something employee
Kenny Hattori calls "the kind of food you get in Tokyo at 2 in the morning, on
your way home from drinking." Yatai translates as food stall; in Tokyo these
highly informal places tend to spring up around train stations, serving a single,
satisfying item like eel tempura, ramen noodles in broth or roasted corn on the
cob.

In New York, the best izakaya are clustered in Midtown; places like Sakagura,
Ise, Riki and Ariyoshi have good-to-great food and are the most crowded.
(Reservations are important: as parties often settle in for several hours of
drinking, tables are not always easy to come by.) These are the places to taste
savory little dishes that, like tapas, are designed around drinking — deep-fried
lotus root, oysters, ginkgo nuts, crisp croquettes of potato or pumpkin, fried
whole small fish, homemade dumplings (a world away from the frozen ones
served at sushi restaurants), steamed eggplant in rich sesame sauce, pork belly
braised in miso or beef chunks fried with garlic.

At most Manhattan izakaya, the printed English menu does not begin to list the
dishes that are actually available, but ask what the specials are and be
persistent: the servers will be able to tell you what's on offer. Most dishes cost no
more than $5.

For refinement, nothing can compare to the gaspingly elegant cuisine of kaiseki,
the formal Japanese tea ceremony that is also a Zen Buddhist meditative
practice, now offered in Manhattan at a few places, like Kai, Sugiyama and
Donguri. In Japan, kaiseki cuisine has taken on a life of its own and is no longer
necessarily associated with a contemplation of the seasons, or even with drinking
tea. "Kaiseki now is a very careful, beautiful, seasonal way to eat, but the chef
can design his own style," said Hitoshi Kagawa, the chef at Kai, where dinner can
include more than 20 tiny dishes, a practice adopted in recent years by many top
American chefs, most famously Thomas Keller of the French Laundry.

At Sugiyama, each course is no more than a few mouthfuls, usually of something
thought-provoking as well as delicious: a whole crab only as big as a thumbnail,
a pickled plum encased in sweet plum jelly, or a dish holding three plain white
squares, one of tofu, one of monkfish and one of pear. "Kaiseki is not how
Japanese people eat every day, but it is still very important to our idea of
Japanese cooking," Mr. Kagawa said through an interpreter last week. In other
words, kaiseki is the equivalent of haute cuisine in France: expensive, elaborate
and somewhat impractical, but still a potent source of national pride and identity.

Also shared by Japan and France is a national cult of ingredients. At Kai, the
menu proudly states that the udon noodles come specifically from Inaniwa in
Akita prefecture, a boast that Japanese clients can instantly appreciate. Megu is
anticipating an audience for superpremium yakitori made from hinai-jidori, the
most expensive chickens in Japan, grilled over binchotan, a charcoal from
Wakayama prefecture that is as hard as steel, burns extra-hot and is supposed
to imbue food with umami. Umami is the famously elusive Japanese fifth flavor —
salty, sour, bitter and sweet are the others — and is pretty much untranslatable.
Savory and complex are two approximations.

"In Japan, people grow up learning about these national treasures, the plums
from this region, the octopus from that peninsula, the tamari from this town,"
said Harris Salat, a New Yorker who has lived and worked in Asia for many
years. "The kind of people here who know about olive oil, or truffles, are just
beginning to appreciate that there are different kinds of soy sauce."

Those people, at least at first, are often chefs. Marcus Samuelsson started as an
amateur sushi lover and became inspired, after several trips to Japan, to make a
serious study of the sushi of the Edo period (1603-1867). When Riingo opens,
pickled and preserved fish will appear on the sushi menu. (Sushi originated as a
pre-refrigeration way to preserve fish. Wrapped in layers of rice, the fish would
slowly ferment, then the rice was thrown away and the fish was eaten.)

Josh DeChellis of Sumile, whose commitment to Japanese ingredients verges on
the worshipful, is equally intense on the subjects of sea urchin, grated fresh
wasabi (a bracing treat that has finally come to New York) and yuzu. The owner
of Sumile, a Japanese pop star called Miwa Yoshida (Mr. DeChellis describes her
as "the Madonna of Japan"), often sends him to cook and learn at her brother's
upscale izakaya in Tokyo. "When I am in Japan, even something as basic as tofu
is a total revelation," he said. "I dream of cooking something as good as
fresh-made tofu with real, aged tamari."

But on the business side of New York's restaurant world, the Japanese value of
simplicity has limited appeal; tofu with tamari isn't going to pay the rent. And so
we have Asiate and Geisha, with Megu and Riingo still to come, all big-ticket
openings that aim to re-interpret Japan for a well-heeled international crowd, as
well as a local one.

At elegant Asiate, overlooking Central Park from the 35th floor of the new
Mandarin Oriental hotel, Noriyuki Sugie sticks closely to the fusion formula of
French technique/Japanese ingredients. (The French chefs who practiced nouvelle
cuisine were fascinated by Japanese cuisine.) But look just past the usual luxury
items on the menu — foie gras, truffles, crab meat — and Mr. Sugie's flavors are
punchy, even proletarian: black soy sauce, beef cheeks, smoky mashed
potatoes and hearty linguine with house-made XO sauce.

Geisha opened in December, with the priceless imprimatur of Eric Ripert (of Le
Bernardin) as consulting chef. You can taste his presence in the five raw-fish
appetizers and in the seafood it flies in from Japan. Geisha has even introduced
New Yorkers to anago nitsume, a sauce traditionally made only in eel
restaurants, by simmering the eels in the same pot of water every day for
several months, then boiling the water down to a thick glaze (fear not, these
days, nitsume is more likely reduced dashi, or fish stock). Despite its Japanese
intentions, Geisha's garnishes, layers and sauces give it a New York air — kaiseki
meets "Sex and the City."

Tadashi Ono's Matsuri is a glamorous izakaya. To Japanese-restaurant regulars,
the little dishes at Matsuri look familiar on paper — oshitashi, boiled spinach in
dashi; fluke sashimi with ponzu; yakitori; miso soup with tofu and seaweed — but
Matsuri is a lovely lesson in the difference between good and great.

Even to diehard fans, the textures and flavors of authentic Japanese desserts are
often mystifying. In the strict Japanese tradition, there is no sweet course; the
meal ends with rice, pickles and tea. Sweets are eaten only between meals, very
sparingly, and always as an accompaniment to tea.

Bill Yosses, pastry chef at Boi and Citarella, who also travels and works in Japan,
explained that the classic wagashi, the semisweet confections sold at Minamoto
Kitchoan and Toraya, are connected to the prestige and long history of the tea
ceremony. "These things are made from 400-year-old recipes," Mr. Yosses said.
"It's as if we were trying to enjoy mead. We probably couldn't." At Citarella, Mr.
Yosses makes his own kanten, juicy fruit jellies flavored with persimmon,
coconut and litchi. (In Japan, kanten are made from agar-agar, a seaweed-based
gelatin that, to American palates, retains a slightly salty, fishy taste.) Some very
satisfying sweet fusions have been accomplished recently, like Matsuri's
exemplary yuzu crème brûlée, but authentic they are not.

And what of sushi? New York's trendiest sushi bars, like those in Tokyo, are now
(gasp) cooking the fish. At Sui, when you order aji, or mackerel, the sushi chef,
Masaki Nakayama, fires up a blowtorch, then uses it to heat and soften the
chewy skin. "The heat also melts the layer of fat right under the skin, which is
where all the flavor is," he said.

And at Matsuri, Mr. Ono is not only searing sushi, but adding a revolutionary dot
of sauce to some of his pieces. "This is very controversial in Japan," Mr. Ono
said. "But it is more and more popular. Even Japanese people can get bored of
soy sauce and wasabi."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company