Word: kaiseki
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...husband and I entered Osaka's Kitcho restaurant, we knew we were in for a one-of-a-kind meal: a master class in kaiseki, or formal banquet cuisine, and also in luxury, Japanese-style. Kaiseki is nothing like most Japanese food abroad. Sukiyaki, tempura, teppanyaki and even sushi are modern and often fusion inventions, many of them created to suit foreign tastes. A kaiseki banquet consists of multiple elaborate minicourses of rare seasonal ingredients, most unknown outside Japan. More than a meal, it's a multidisciplinary feast for the senses. Since it has roots in the Zen tea ceremony...
...reassured Kitcho that we weren't strangers to kaiseki. We've eaten at many exclusive kaiseki restaurants, including the renowned Hyotei and Kikunoi. I speak passable Japanese, and my epicurean husband happily devours everything from poison-blowfish sperm to stewed snapping turtle. Kitcho doesn't take credit cards, so we were prepared to pay $400 to $600 per person in cash. But in Japan--and certainly at Kitcho--protocol and relationships are sacred. You are nobody until someone introduces you properly. For us the magic word came from a friend, the Catalan chef Santi Santamaria, who had been introduced...
Molly Ringwald's sushi lunch was oh-so-sophisticated in The Breakfast Club, but that was 1985. Now that sushi has gone mainstream and Nobu has metastasized into a low-fat Hard Rock Cafe, Europe is ready for a lesson in kaiseki. At least, Ichiro Kubota, Umu's executive chef, thinks so. Kaiseki is a formal banquet [an error occurred while processing this directive]of a series of exquisite courses showcasing cooking techniques and seasonal sensitivity. It's the highest edible expression of Japanese aesthetics, with prices to match. At Umu, London's most ambitious kaiseki restaurant, Kubota goes...
None of the ingredients is discernibly Japanese. And few customers would guess that the presentation derives from a kaiseki concept involving twin peaks hugging a waterfall. "A diner might not recognize the Japanese influence," says Nish, surveying his work in the kitchen of March, his exclusive Manhattan restaurant. "But the influence is significant...
French cuisine, in its classic forms, is mostly verbs and modifiers: the mixing, processing and transforming of raw material. High Japanese cooking, whose root is the austere kaiseki style associated with the tea ceremony, is by contrast all nouns. It is devoted to the thing-as-such, presented in small units with the precision of the razor knives that cut it and the picky exactitude of the little chopsticks that bring it to the mouth. Its decor is astringent, not sweet. Japanese cuisine's simplicity is a very high fiction, requiring too much skilled labor...