I’ve actually seen him give customers the boot, something I never thought I would see in my lifetime. Before my Nozawa experience, I’d seen it only once before: at 150 Wooster, Manhattan’s hottest celebrity-driven dining spot in the eighties. I was in there one night and looked over to see a regular, seated at one of the premier tables, sent out the door midmeal, dinner hastily packed up in hand, because they wanted to give Mick Jagger and his entourage that table. But that’s nothing compared to Sushi Nozawa, where nearly every time I visited someone got kicked out for not playing by Nozawa’s rules. He’s got opinions, to say the least.
The sushi in New York, Los Angeles, and other major cities around the globe is superb, but if you want the best, go to Japan. In recent years, Tokyo has emerged as a big player in the global food scene, possibly even more so than Paris or New York, especially in the last few years. Consider the controversy that sparked after Michelin assembled their first-ever dining guide for Tokyo. Michelin, famous for their tires, is just as famous for their restaurant and hotel guides. More than a century ago, the Michelin Company created the guide to help traveling salesmen find restaurant and hotel recommendations on the road. Today, it’s sort of the ultimate restaurant guide, dealing mostly with European offerings. Eventually, they started covering the United States, and a couple of years ago they announced a plan to put together a Tokyo book.
The total number of stars given to Tokyo restaurants eclipsed that of Parisian restaurants, sending off a firestorm of conversation in the blogosphere and in restaurant kitchens worldwide. Which one is the greatest eating city? I’ve spent a lot of time eating my way around the world’s food meccas, including Paris and Tokyo. You can’t convince me that Tokyo isn’t the most exciting food city in the world—let’s put it that way, and that says a lot. It’s sort of like asking, who’s the better basketball player: Magic, Bird, or Michael? Who’s a better golfer: Jack Nicklaus or Tiger Woods? It’s hard to say.
There certainly is a lot of culinary magic going on in Japan, and not just with their restaurants. Good Japanese cooks, and I’ve had the pleasure of working with many in my life, are brilliant replicators. So precise, with impeccable knife skills. Their diligence, discipline, and powers of concentration are far beyond the average Western cook’s. Give them a classic French or Italian dish and within a day they can nail it every time. The great French and Italian restaurants in Tokyo are hindered only by availability of ingredients, which in the age of the airplane does not limit them much at all. But the last time I was in Tokyo, I had the opportunity to have a meal alone by myself in an empty restaurant in between lunch and dinner that stands to this day as the greatest single sushi experience I’ve ever had.
Sushi Mizutani is a teeny restaurant in the basement of the Ginza Seiwa Silver Building, right around the corner from the Shimbashi Station. Open six days a week, serving lunch and dinner Monday through Friday, I’d have to say this gem is the best sushi restaurant in the city.
Don’t go with a crowd—you won’t want to. Go with one good friend—preferably someone you feel comfortable pawning the bill off on. You’ll easily spend $200 to $300 a person—and with Mizutani’s amazing sake collection, probably a lot more. Depending on how the space is configured, you might even want to go alone—the place holds only between eight and ten counter seats. Behind the counter is a space that is only big enough for one person to walk through at a time, and there is only one chef here, so no need for more room. A table for two, tucked away in the corner across from the sushi bar, may be used at dinnertime, but only when the chef Mizutani deems it fit to seat someone there. He loves to dole food out himself, lavishing stories on his patrons, allowing them a front and center seat to what may be the greatest set of sushi skills operating in the world. Mizutani is the man. Every bite of food in this restaurant passes through his hands at some point.
The real magic happens before the restaurant even opens, when Mizutani himself, along with his assistant, prowls the markets, collecting the best product available in the city—and with almost fifty years of cooking under his belt, he knows what he’s looking for. He’s a neat and tidy little man, very thin with a big, round face and easy smile. His giant round glasses emphasize the sloping features of his face. He’s probably approaching seventy if he’s not already there, but he has the energy of a man half his age.
His restaurant is spare and without pretention. You actually go down into the building’s basement, where you’ll find a nondescript sliding screen door. You knock and enter. It’s one of the more hidden-away restaurants that I’ve ever experienced, especially for one of this caliber, but Mizutani doesn’t want it any other way.
He’s been there for years now, doing what he does like no other: simply providing people with the best. The best-quality fish and shellfish, the best aged soy sauce, the best shari (vinegared rice). Every ingredient has a special provenance. His rice, for example, comes from a handful of growers at a very special farm a couple hundred miles away. The vinegar is made in a renowned prefecture in northern Japan. Dishes have few ingredients, but each one is of the highest quality available, bar none. This all sounds very serious, but the restaurant’s vibe is anything but. It’s hard to contain yourself when you’re just blown away by this food.
Dinner reservations are scheduled months in advance, if you can get in at all. Lunch, of course, is less crowded and you might be able to weasel your way in, especially early or late. I couldn’t get there during regular service hours, so Mizutani met with me in between meal periods. I watched as lunch emptied out before I sat down to eat alone with him, chatting with him about his craft.
I think the food world has sort of come full circle in many ways. It used to be that all food was served on platters. Think of Erroll Flynn’s Robin Hood, in which the banquet scene reveals that in that day and age, and it is historically correct, all the food was on platters, with everyone sharing family-style. Over the course of the next couple hundred years, as the food idea slowly turned into less of a classist exercise, taverns came into vogue, and then restaurants. Real restaurant culture developed in Europe in the early nineteenth century, but tavern culture, places to have a meal, existed for centuries. Individual foods plated in single servings is a relatively modern convention.
For hundreds of years, it was restaurants themselves—not the food or chef—that were famous. Certainly, many chefs garnered fame for inventing certain dishes at certain restaurants, especially in America. Chefs of the Delmonico Restaurant in the nineteenth century were justifiably famous, not necessarily by name or face, but by reputation. And it didn’t matter who was cooking—you always knew someone good was there, much like Commander’s Palace in New Orleans today. This has been home to some of the greatest chefs working in the South. You knew every time you went there, year in and year out, that it was going to be good.
Over the course of time, the restaurateur, the owner, became famous, or the man running the room. Pavilion in New York was a famous restaurant, but when Andre Soule was in his heyday, in New York’s Truman Capote era of the fifties and sixties, Pavilion reigned supreme. People flocked to Pavilion, and everyone remembers Soule and the restaurant but not the chef or the food. Which isn’t to say it wasn’t good or he wasn’t a star; it’s just that society in those days placed a larger premium on other facets of restaurant life than it does today.
For the past few decades, restaurants have been all about the chef. Thomas Keller, Wolfgang Puck, Charlie Trotter … These guys are regarded more like rock stars than chefs. And deservingly. I’d put myself in the long list of people who’d be willing to wait for weeks in a freezing cold rain for a meal at the French Laundry.
These days, the ingredients are as important as the person cooking it. You go to many restaurants not just to see what a certain chef can do with a given menu or oeuvre, but to eat ingredients available nowhere else. Sometimes the chef and his ingredients are synonymous. People flock to Blue Hill in New York not only to taste Dan Barber’s food, knowin
g that means the most farm-fresh ingredients. In terms of menu, only the most discriminating of chefs can offer the kind of shopping Barber is capable of, mainly because he grows and raises much of his ingredients. Today, it’s all about ingredient worship, and I think sushi bars are the most obvious places to witness that development.
When it comes to ingredients, Japan’s respect for food matches Italy’s passion and simplicity. Like Japanese cuisine, Italian food at its essence is extremely simple, extremely seasonal, and not overly complex or clichéd. But the Japanese are indeed special. I think it’s the only culture in the world where a single pickled plum served on a giant plate gets the kind of oohs and aahs that are otherwise reserved for more ambitious culinary pyrotechnics. In Japan, “simple” really works in a way that it doesn’t elsewhere. It’s pretentious when I see that type of cooking in other restaurants; they are just imitators and replicators, as opposed to true disciples. When you’re in a Japanese restaurant where a chef is actually making complex philosophical decisions about what to put on a plate, it can get really impressive. Japanese chefs would never serve that plum at its peak of ripeness just sitting naked on a dish; they would feel rightfully obligated to cook or prepare it in some way, even subtly. I mean, that’s why you go to a restaurant, right? If you want to eat the perfect raw plum, you go see a farmer; you wouldn’t go see a chef. But—and it’s a big but—if anyone cooks food in a more naked or exposed or simple oeuvre than the Japanese do, I haven’t seen it.
Great Japanese chefs do just enough to those items to heighten the eating experience without killing the ingredient. An ingredient captured at its peak moment of texture and flavor may not need much tweaking, which is why Mizutani’s “less is more” approach works.
Mizutani himself greeted me at the door while his wife and assistant tidied up the kitchen and helped with some mis-en-place work—it’s still a restaurant, after all. He invited me to sit at the sushi bar and asked me for my order. Who would better know what to order than Mizutani himself? I opted for an omakase-style meal, where you let the chef take the reins and pray for the best.
Of course, I had nothing to worry about here. Mizutani serves only the best. Japan grows great rice, and Mizutani has been getting his from the same family for years. All their rice is hand planted, tended, and harvested in small batches. The care with which Mizutani prepares the rice is astounding. He washes and dries it, then gently cooks and seasons it with his specially formulated vinegars to give it a faint sweetness. This special care affects the way he cuts and stores his fish, and the way he handles individual pieces of fish, especially ones with a high fat content—like certain cuts of tuna—not allowing the warmth of his hand to change the texture of the fish. Rice. Fish. Plate. Simple, but not easy.
I watched as he handled the mackerel, or saba. He cups the fish in his hand, keeping his palm in contact with the rice for a different length of time, depending on the fish itself, transforming the flavor for the better, making it less fishy and less oily, as the warmth of the rice and his hand actually draws some of that oil from the fish into the rice itself. In a sense, he cooks with his hands.
What blew me away the most were the little things. I received the fish one piece at a time, and each one had a story. This mackerel was caught by his friend; that scallop, hand collected by divers he knew in the north—and he bought only four or five a day when they were available at the Tsukiji Market. I received a thin slice from the top of the scallop, still in its shell, and watched as he draped it on top of the shari, the vinegar rice with the barest brush of wasabi. He invited me to dip the piece of scallop sushi in soy sauce, which is so phenomenal that I contemplated drinking the stuff like a shot of espresso.
It’s not that Mizutani serves the most unusual fish. My meal ran the full gamut of traditional fish, such as kagai, mirugai, and hokigai. However, superior freshness, presentation, and symphony of texture exalted this meal to a new level. I ate several different types of flounder, called hirame. The dorsal fin was one of the most fabulous textures of any sushi I’ve ever eaten: crisp and corrugated, sweet and briny. The monkfish liver was kissed with sake and mirin, warmed ever so slightly. He followed up with paper-thin slices of abalone draped over rice sushi style, chutoro (which is the meaty and fatty cut of bluefin tuna taken from the belly), incredibly fatty otoro as well, along with maguro.
The squid was so fresh and delicate, cut with a dazzling sort of diamond cutter’s expertise. Millions of little knife marks ran across the flesh in a crosshatch pattern, allowing the fish to literally disappear on your tongue. I had two types of eel, freshwater and saltwater, braised in a soy, sugar, and mirin sauce, reduced down to a syrup. The fish is cooled and cut to order, sauced and thrown under a broiler to char the edges, then draped over small balls of rice.
Mizutani served the best uni that I’ve ever eaten in my life. He directed me to his uni guy at the market. A few days later, a friend and I bought a whole tray of uni, about 500 grams. We demolished the whole thing with two spoons, standing in the area between food stalls at 10 in the morning as cleanup crews hosed down the market’s walkways.
The shad that I had, a small bony fish that is also called kohada, is usually a very pedestrian sort of fish in America, but in the hands of Mizutani, it was absolutely insane. His knife work is amazing, and he left little bits of skin on the shad but cut away other little pieces of the skin so it simply disappeared in the mouth. I had aji, a Spanish horse mackerel minced as a little sashimi course, that was ethereal. These offerings are normally fishy even in the best of eateries; here they aren’t. And his cooking skill is amazing.
Everybody raves about his tamago. This egg dish is placed in a square or rectangular pan, cooked in thin sheets and folded on itself, then pressed into a block. It is typically sweetened, and it makes a great last bite in a sushi meal. Mizutani’s tamago was creamy and textured in a way that reminded me of ripe peaches.
I’m a big student of art history. In that field we always talk about the space that sculptures occupy, but more important, we should also talk about the negative space where something isn’t. Often, less is more. It’s the greatest discipline challenge for chefs. I love young, bold, brash chefs. I love to eat their food. Their experimentation is awesome, but often there are one too many ingredients on the plate. A bold, brave chef who’s been around the block a few times yet still harbors that energy and curiosity in the kitchen relies less on gimmicks and needs fewer ingredients. Ingredients, pyrotechnics, and architecture in the kitchen is a great way to cover up lack of skill. Serving a single piece of fish placed on a small mound of vinegar rice is naked cooking. You’re on a tightrope without a net. This simplicity and greatness come only from those who understand that all good cooking stems from good shopping.
But Mizutani is more than a shopper. He’s disciplined enough to buy only foods at their peak of flavor. He knows the best way to handle and prepare a fish. This passion translates to patrons. He is a master, and that is what he loves the most. It’s why he doesn’t have twenty seats. It’s why he likes to seat people only at his sushi bar. He wants to continue the connection he has with his purveyors, his ingredients, his techniques with the people he’s ultimately trying to resonate with. A great chef or restaurateur knows great food doesn’t end in the kitchen. It ends on the table. And to think that this type of perfection and artistry sit unassumingly in a basement in Ginza.
Lamb Alley
Dining Nose to Tail in
the Djemaa El Fna
aedeker’s antique travel books wax poetic about pulling into a city by boat. I often think of how gorgeous the confluence of waterways must have looked at the site of the ancient city of Constantinople, now Istanbul. How it must have looked to visitors arriving by ship through the Bosphorus, with Asia on one side, present-day Europe on the other, and the Blue Mosque straight ahead. Imagine arriving into Venice hundreds of years ago, when the rest of the world lagged so far behind culturally and architecturally. What a staggering and s
urprising sight that must have been, or the Canton of a thousand years ago, or sailing up the Thames into eighth-century London when it was traded back and forth among warring tribes of Norsemen on a yearly basis. Modern times don’t allow for too many sea-travel opportunities, save mega-cruise ships that lack the certain, romantic je ne sais quoi that they used to, and nowadays cruise ships sit in the most unglamorous of ports, shunned from the prime locales mostly for reasons of efficiency. But I think descending through the cloud cover via airplane can be absolutely breathtaking as well.
I’ve flown over and into Quito’s Avenue of Fire. Following a valley of dormant and active volcanoes, we descended into one of the highest elevated capital cities in the world. To see these volcanoes from overhead is intimidating in the extreme and stunning, with the green and gold of the highlands peeking far up to the shoulders of the mountains themselves before giving way to rocky crowns. As far as man-made sights go, nothing beats landing at New York’s La Guardia airport, with its stunning view of the most famous skyline in the world. The shores of Samoa from the air are exquisite; ditto Hawaii. A daytime landing into Tokyo always means a great peek at Mt. Fuji, looking just the way it does on postcards, replete with its white cake-frosting drips of snow running down its face.
I’ve racked up well over a million frequent-flier miles, and to my mind, landing in Marrakesh, Morocco, still remains one of the most wonderful sights to take in from a plane. A vast, brown hardscrabble desert abruptly morphs into a sprawling city, with thousands of clay-tile-roofed buildings, not one skyscraper in sight. Drying laundry, strung on lazily stretched lines, crawls from small chimneys to iron pipe jutting out of the side of a neighbor’s house, crisscrossed and repeated over the whole of the ancient red cityscape. And then there are the satellite dishes, poking out of every single home. And I mean every home. It’s an ocean of satellite dishes in the middle of the desert. I found myself absolutely enchanted by this juxtaposition of ancient and modern life. It made me smile all the way through landing and the lengthy immigration process.
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