by Jay Rayner
I take a trip to the Emirates Towers Hotel for a long, lazy dinner at Al Nafoorah, which is regarded by many people I talk to as the best Lebanese restaurant in Dubai. I am there with Guillaume Rochette, who, as in Moscow, happens to be in town at the same time as me. I take the opportunity to ask him whether Mrs. Putin really did have money invested in the restaurant she had suddenly arrived at, the day he had taken me to meet Arkady Novikov.
Rochette, keen not to betray a good client’s confidences, purses his lips in a showy display of keeping his silence, but he is a noisy Frenchman, incapable of muting his body language, and he rolls his eyes theatrically as if to say: the naïvete´ of this boy! Why else would the Russian president’s wife spend forty-five minutes touring an unopened restaurant?
We drink a bottle of Chateau Musar, the soot-black Lebanese red from the Beka Valley that kept being produced throughout that country’s civil war in the 1980s, and eat fatoush, a lusciously smooth hummus and great smoky skewers of expertly grilled lamb and chicken. Quickly we begin to imagine that this is the Middle East we are really in, when of course Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates are not the same thing at all.
One morning I am taken by the French executive chef of the Grosvenor House, Patrick Lannes, to meet a seventy-year-old Bostonian who has just arrived in town. The moment we see each other I feel only pity for him. This Bostonian is a twelve-pound lobster, dragged out of the chill waters off America’s northeast shore only forty-eight hours previously. He is a huge, black-blue thing, with two-foot-long pincers that are misshapen and gnarled from years of growth. He is still alive, but sluggish and heavy of claw.
I point out to Lannes that, at this advanced age, the lobster will make for very poor eating, the meat woody, tough, and flavorless.
“Perhaps,” the chef says, staring admiringly at him over the top of his fashionable, black-framed glasses. “But he will make a very impressive centerpiece for the New Year’s Eve buffet.” Life in Dubai is a parade, a raucous spectacle, and after surviving for seventy years, this lobster will now die to become a part of it.
That night I go for a dinner with a brassy Mancunian woman called Gail Colclough, who was once the private DJ for the Sultan of Brunei’s brother and his harem. “They wanted a woman because they didn’t trust a man around the girls,” Gail says, over Barbie-pink daiquiris. “It was the largest private rig in the world. The lights were so powerful, they kept setting fire to the curtains.” Was she a part of the harem? “No, love. I just put on the ABBA.” She took the job, she says, because she wanted to find out if the richest people in the world were happy. “In the end, it was pity that drove me away. They were all sad. They were the saddest people I’d ever met.”
So she left Brunei and came to Dubai, where she promotes tours by British stand-up comedians and runs package holidays for wealthy women who want a little cosmetic surgery done while they are in town. Cosmetic surgery is booming in Dubai. “Liposuction is the most popular,” she says. “After that, it’s breast enlargements and face-lifts.” She arranges a lot of face-lifts.
Gail is such a remarkable source of stories, delivered in such a deadpan manner, that she almost manages to distract me from the curious food being served to us at Tang, which is located inside a beach hotel not far from the Jumeirah Palm. The young chef, Stephane Buchholzer, has become enamored of the cooking of Ferran Adria at El Bulli, even though he has never eaten there. So there is a deconstructed Niçoise salad: raw tuna wrapped in a lettuce leaf alongside powders of olive, green beans, garlic, and tomato, all topped with a foam of smoked egg. I drag the fish through the powders and it almost tastes like a Nicoise, but not quite.
Strands of crab come wrapped in dehydrated mango and sprinkled with licorice powder, and foie gras is served with tubes of coffee-flavored gel. The young team is enthusiastic about what they are doing, and it seems churlish to point out that I have seen versions of all these dishes at restaurants in London and New York. One thing is certain: Theirs will be the only place specializing in this kind of culinary mischief for 1,500 miles in any direction. That is an achievement of sorts, and a mark of the speed with which ideas are now disseminated around the world. If a dish is served in the Catalan hills one week, it will be on a menu on the other side of the world the next.
None of these adventures manage to sum up Dubai for me. No matter. I now know what I have to do. I ask my butler to call up the limo so I can return to the Mall of the Emirates.
I take a table at the St. Moritz Café and sit next to the plate-glass window looking into Ski Dubai, where children in salopettes throw snowballs at one another, skid down icy slopes on their bottoms, and laugh uproariously. Next to me is a fireplace where logs burn fiercely, casting a warming glow across my table. Except that it is not a real fire, but an image of one on a sixty-inch plasma-screen television fitted into the fireplace. Naturally, I order the fondue.
My wife is half Swiss. As a result, fondues have been eaten without irony in our house for many years. I know a lot about them. I know about the need to rub the pot with cut garlic to start and I understand the careful mix of salty Gruyère for flavor and waxy, dull Emmental for bulk, and what temperature to heat the wine to before the melting can begin. Of course, the fondue served here is awful. How could it be otherwise? St. Moritz is unlicensed, so they cannot use wine and there is a graininess to the melted cheese which speaks of much too much flour to thicken it, but there is a guttering paraffin burner, a basket of cut bread, and a prong with which to introduce it to the cheese.
Outside the Mall of the Emirates it is 23 degrees Centigrade (74 degrees Fahrenheit), which only adds to the experience. The televisual logs crackle, the children rub snow into one another’s hair, I eat my fondue and revel in the glorious fakery of it all. I am afloat on the seas of the twenty-first century, enjoying a lunch that only modern technology could gift me. The fondue part of it should be comforting. It should have grounded me. Instead, the whole experience is so bizarre, so contrived, I quickly realize I am in the grips of an intense culture shock. I conclude this is no bad thing. I regard it as an initiation, a taste of things to come—because where I’m going next I’ll be getting an awful lot of that.
FOUR
TOKYO
My cab driver is lost. This is not a criticism. All Tokyo cab drivers are lost for most of the time, and mine, a tidy, middle-aged gentleman in the standard uniform of black jacket, white collar, and tie, is no different. Or, to be more precise, he knows where he is but he has no idea how to get me to where I need to go. Few of the city’s streets have names, and most addresses are merely descriptive—third door along on the left, just past the big tower block opposite the park—which makes the end of many journeys a random event. One might imagine that, after years of having to deal with the problem, the drivers would have devised a cunning strategy to get around it, but they haven’t. They have merely made an accommodation with it, submitted to its chaos, and I have been told I should do the same.
Which is why, despite nine time zones of jet lag and a pathological tendency to control freakery, I am not at all bothered when the driver swerves to the side of the road, flings open the door, jumps out, and disappears on foot down a black-shadowed alley in search of my destination, leaving me alone in the cab, its engine idling. If anything, I am pleased. It means the restaurant I am about to visit is the real thing, a place of such refinement and exclusivity that, despite the likely size of the bill and the difficulty of securing a reservation, almost nobody has ever heard of it.
Tokyo’s restaurant world has proved a steep learning curve for me. In the other cities I have visited, identifying the top restaurants has been a breeze, hardly demanding the investigative talents of, say, a Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein. In Las Vegas it had to be the restaurants of Robuchon and Keller. In Moscow it had to be Pushkin and Turandot. In Dubai it had to be Al Mahara, Ramsay, and the rest. In Tokyo, nothing is obvious. Sure, there are the cloned outposts of the Western chefs, the restaurant of Pierre Gag
naire, say or—stifle the yawn—Robuchon and Ramsay. What fascinates me about Tokyo is not merely its appetite for non-Japanese food, which is both deep and broad, but its parallel commitment to its own culinary traditions. I had been told stories about tiny, high-end places, hidden away in apartment buildings or in the basements of office blocks, serving intricate menus of extraordinary clarity and precision to just four or six people. There were dozens of them. The problem was that I didn’t know any of their names, let alone how to book myself a seat.
I called Pim Techamuanvivit, a San Francisco–based Thai woman, whose Web site, Chez Pim, has become one of the most famous food blogs in the world. She used to undertake complicated behavioral research for high-tech companies in Silicon Valley and now spends the cash she made there traveling the world, eating in expensive restaurants, and photographing her dinner for her blog. I told her what I was looking for.
She laughed. “They won’t let you in.”
“Why not?”
“You’re a round eye.”
Plus, she said, you don’t speak Japanese. She told me about a Japanese-American friend of hers who had considered herself reasonably fluent in Japanese, until she was refused bookings at some high-end Tokyo place because her grasp of the language was not considered good enough. I shouldn’t feel put out, Pim said. Many of these restaurants are closed to Japanese people, too. A lot of them won’t grant you entry unless you are recommended by an existing customer; ideally one who is related to you by blood. Then there was the bill to worry about. She told me $1,000 a head wasn’t uncommon.
The money thing was frightening. Into my mind came an image of my platinum credit card, that dear sliver of gunmetal gray plastic that had become such a friend to me on this journey, now suddenly belching smoke, Mission: Impossible style, as it came into contact with the bill. Otherwise I liked what I was hearing. I still appreciated the notion of democracy attached to high-end restaurants, the way the price of dinner might buy you a glimpse of a plutocrat’s gilded life, but I liked this Japanese idea of specialness even more. Getting into these restaurants wasn’t simply about financial heft. It was about connections, about proving your worth in other ways.
It was, of course, completely undemocratic, grossly elitist and, being rooted in an unspoken anti-Western racism, utterly reprehensible. Even so, I couldn’t stop myself imagining that there was a direct and positive correlation between the difficulty in obtaining a booking and the unalloyed deliciousness of the food available. As I pursued these reservations I became convinced that, simply by landing them, I would mark myself out as some kind of hardcore gastronomic ninja, a seeker after true taste. I would be the Roald Amundsen of the table, the Ernest Shackleton of the sushi bar. High-end Japanese restaurants are like that. They can turn you just a little bit mad.
One day, not long before my trip, I went to see Jean-Luc Naret, the French head of the Michelin restaurant guides who was in London to launch the new British edition. Though it hadn’t yet been announced officially it was suspected that Michelin was working on a Tokyo guide. I told Naret what I was looking for, that I wanted the names of the really small places, serving only the good stuff, and he promised to help me. As requested, I e-mailed him. He never replied.
I called Mark Edwards, the London-based executive chef for the Nobu group worldwide. I asked him for recommendations. He said he could do better than that. He said he could get Nobu to book them for me.
Nobu!
Booking tables!
FOR ME!
I was a made man. Surely every door would open now? Nobu Matsuhisa himself—the man responsible for spreading the doctrine of high-end Japanese food about the world, Robert De Niro’s best pal, the one who feeds all those slinky models and actresses who don’t eat—he was going to play concierge just for me. He was going to get me dinner dates. Job done.
Except it wasn’t. Having offered to perform a task I had never asked of him, Edwards stopped returning my calls and e-mails until it was far too late. The days until my trip slipped away, the window for making impossible-to-get bookings becoming smaller and smaller. I imagined Nobu rolling his eyes at Edwards’s request. Reservations? For a London restaurant critic? Don’t be so bloody silly. Now, plate up some more of the black cod in miso that the skinny models and actresses like to pick at.
With just a week to go until my trip, I threw myself upon the mercy of Hide Yamamoto, the executive chef of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, where I would be staying. I gave him a budget of $500 a head per meal. Yamamoto said he would see what he could do.
Which is how, on my very first night in the city, overtraveled and underslept, scrubbed and suited, Tokyo-dazzled and jet-lag hungry, I find myself standing by my cab, watching the driver walk the pavement peering at street signs and door numbers. Eventually, together, we find the entrance. It is a red lift door in a small, anonymous six-story apartment block. It looks like the kind of place where a woman with too many cats might live a life of quiet desperation. I take the lift to the third floor and discover that it is nothing of the sort. There is no old woman. There are no cats.
Instead I find food heaven. It is the restaurant at the end of the universe. It is deliciousness in seventeen courses. I have found my way to Yukimura.
Clearly, in another life this was an apartment and the brightly lit, modest room I enter would have been the lounge. Half the space is filled by a three-sided blond-wood counter, seating nine people, which cuts off one corner. I mutter Hide Yamamoto’s name at a young woman in a black trouser suit, the only waiter in the place, and she smiles and nods. They are expecting me. I am shown to seat three on the bar, and the chef, Jun Yukimura, bows to me.
He is a cheerful, middle-aged man in a white jacket and a white triangular cap of the sort worn by burger flippers in American diners of the 1950s. His cap is set at a jaunty angle, and his hair is buzz-cut to a fuzz at the nape. He is accompanied by three young and earnest-looking cooks, who move between the preparation area at the bar and a kitchen in a room behind, talking in whispers. Jun is both chef and host. He jokes with his customers, offers up asides of wisdom and encouragement. Obviously I understand not a single word of this, but he has a mobile and animated face that supplies subtitles of its own. I smile a lot.
It begins. I am presented with a shiny square black plate bearing two slices of the sweetest raw scallop I have ever eaten, with some slivers of crisp pickled vegetables, golden grated crumbs of preserved sea cucumber roe, and a luscious white mayonnaise-like sauce. Next, a pot of a hot custard flavored with more of the sea cucumber roe, tasting ripely of the sea. Then a small emptied crab shell filled with leg meat and fish roe and a little light sugar syrup. There are slippery tender slices of raw venison, the color of a fresh hemorrhage, followed by tiny white vinagered fish, and then some pieces of cured mackerel with just-warm rice wrapped in crisp, toasted sheets of seaweed to be eaten by hand. There are small fish I do not recognize, cooked on the hibachi grill in the corner, the sweetness of which is undercut by the sudden, life-affirming bitterness of the guts. I am served some greaseless tempura, and a refreshing salad of mushrooms and greens and a steaming bowl of soup with silky bean curd and the sudden, nose-tickling hit of horseradish.
To one side of me a couple orders a bottle of Chassagne-Montrachet. On the other I am joined by a young man and an older woman, mother and son. Mr. Suzuki is in building management and is eager to test out his English. He offers me a glass of the DVX Mumm Cuvée Napa champenoise that they have brought with them for the occasion.
He says, “How do you come to be here?”
I explain that the executive chef of my hotel booked me in, that I am a writer investigating the restaurants of Tokyo. He looks impressed. I ask him why.
“I have never seen a foreigner here before. This is a very special place. You have to know about it to eat here.” This last seems a statement of the obvious, but I know what he means. As if to explain himself, he says, “You need to be recommended to come in, and it takes a lon
g time to get a reservation.” He tells me he booked in over two months ago, but says that’s what you have to do if you want to taste the crab.
As he talks, one of the cooks places a whole pale pink beast a foot and a half across onto the counter, which, from the ridges on its shell and the long, spindly legs, looks like a species of spider crab. This is why everybody is here. This is what they have come for. The Zuwai-Gani, fished from the waters north of Kyoto, the city where Yukimura trained before coming to Tokyo in 2000, is only in season for a couple of months, and I am fortunate to be here just as that season is ending. I am ashamed that I had no idea about this, that I had simply rocked up in search of dinner.
The crab is sprouting a spume of shiny bubbles from somewhere around its mouth in a way that suggests it is still alive, but it doesn’t stay that way for long. It is cut up with two deft, quartering slices from a machete, dissected further, and the pieces placed on the hibachi, where they are cooked until the proteins have only just set. First there is a leg, then another; a claw, then a piece of the body. It is the richest white crabmeat I have ever tasted, with that curious balance of salt and sweet. The amount of meat that I scrape from the shell with chopsticks is slight, but hugely satisfying. At the end of the crab dishes, I am presented with the main shell filled with a hot and powerful stew of the brown meat, which is so pungent, so savory, I want to run my finger around the edges to clean it out, though I resist the temptation.
Even then, I am not finished. I am given a little more of the sea cucumber roe that has been barbecued, to pump up the flavors of salt, sweet, and umami. There is a broth of finely sliced vegetables with ponzu zest (a kind of Japanese lemon), and some soupy rice, and then the sweetest, brightest lipstick-red strawberries with sake ice cream, and finally a lotus root jelly that tastes calmingly of tea.