Through open doors we can see that each room has its own hearth in the centre. In it is a carefully arranged pyramid of glowing-red charcoal sticks framed by a square counter around which the diners sit on the tatami-covered floor. There is laughter and the chinking of plates and glasses. Our shoulders begin to relax. ‘It doesn’t seem much like a restaurant, it’s more like someone’s home,’ says Asger. I have that warm, convivial feeling, common to the first few moments in any good restaurant, the sense of relief that we are in capable hands, that we are going to have the loveliest of evenings.
In our room, we meet Masashi Yamada, the restaurant’s manager, brother of the head chef and the grandson of the man who founded the restaurant, just after World War II. Yamada is chatty and friendly, and dressed in an indigo samue (like Japanese work pyjamas) with a rock star’s quiff and wispy beard. He will be serving us that evening, tending to the charcoal which is already white hot, and cooking our meal in the open hearth ‘irori’ style.
A challenging note is struck by the appetiser, a small bowl of bee larvae cooked for six hours tsukudani-style and served in a beautifully wonky, wabi-sabi ceramic dish, but thereafter our meal at Yanagiya is an entirely pleasurable tour through a range of freshly caught, fat-cloaked local game meats pierced on wooden skewers, stuck into the ashes angled towards the glowing coals, and grilled to perfection. To begin, there is wild duck skin, chewy and dripping with fat, followed by the bird’s tenderloin and breast. And then comes the wild boar.
‘Virgins always taste best!’ declares Yamada-san as he pushes the skewers of boar – each chunk of meat insulated by a thick parenthesis of glistening, soon-to-be blistering, yellow fat – into the ashes, carefully angling them towards the hot coals. ‘Virgin meat is soft, and the fat is sweeter. They eat wild taro and chestnuts. This one was killed two days ago. My dad says that hunters always eat the meat fresh, so that’s what we do.’
The taste of that virgin boar – in particular its sweet fat – will linger in my memory for a very long time. It is as if the beast had gorged on Gummy Bears. Almost as good is the next course, venison, with a deep herby flavour that lingers on the palate like a great red wine, and is served with punchy yuzu kosho. Again, the fat of the venison is the real star: its sweet savour literally makes my hair stand on end, an almost primeval frisson of pleasure.
At one point I ask Yamada about the secret of Yanagiya’s online popularity. ‘I think it is because what we do is so personal, each room with its own chef,’ he says as he bastes a skewer of duck leg with the restaurant’s seventy-year-old soy/ginger tare. ‘It’s very rare, this way of cooking. Plus, of course, the meat is all local, everything is from nature. My father was a very strange guy. Even thirty or forty years ago, he insisted on that when everyone else was into farm-raised wagyu. You know the problem with wagyu? It all tastes the same. I like it when every piece of meat has its own taste.’
He talks us through the seasons: duck is good in November and December, as is wild boar and bear. ‘After that, the bears are sleeping,’ he adds. These were not grizzlies, as found in Hokkaido, but the smaller ‘moon bears’ – much better eating, apparently. ‘I’d really, really love to come back and try the bear,’ says Emil, elbowing me intently. In spring come the ‘sansai’, the slightly bitter, foraged mountain vegetables, like fiddlehead ferns, and freshwater trout. Late spring is the season for the revered ayu – ‘sweet river fish’ – and the precious unagi. Unusually, at Yanagiya even this is wild, which, as we’ve heard, is extremely rare. It is expensive too, admits Masashi. These days a kilo will cost him around ¥12,000 (c. £90).
‘It is very, very hard to find, we have eight different suppliers, but wild unagi is ten times better than farmed. Have you smelled farmed unagi? Farmed have no muscle, it’s all fat. It’s a secret, but they feed them with a lot of chemicals and hormones, like lots of farmed salmon. Wild unagi eats natural food.’
After the unagi of summer, come the matsutake mushrooms of autumn. These are the Japanese porcini, as precious as truffles to the French. Later in the year they serve what Masashi coyly calls ‘the secret bird’, which he hints might be illegal. Was it small, and eaten whole, like the ortolan (beloved of French gourmands and, famously, enjoyed by François Mitterrand as his last meal)? ‘Yes, exactly; like the one they eat under a sheet.’
As he talks, one of the paper screens slides open and in toddles a small boy with long, thick, glossy black hair. This is Shu, Yamada’s adorable son. ‘I hope he will work here one day,’ he says as Shu presents me with his business card in the proper, two-handed manner. On it is written his name, ‘Shume Yamada’, and the title: ‘Head Waiter’.
As Asger and Emil play with Shu, I ask his father about this ‘ichigen-san okotowari’ nonsense, the closed reservation system which seems to me designed to discriminate specifically against foreigners.
‘It’s not about keeping foreigners out. We want to keep our regulars happy,’ he replies mildly. ‘We have customers who have been coming here for decades, one of them for thirty-six years in a row, and they need to be able to come every time. That is more important to us than filling every place every night.’
Yanagiya attracts quite a starry array of regulars. One of them is Iron Chef Morimoto, another the Japanese footballer Hidetoshi Nakata, a legend in his home country and to fans of Roma and Bolton, for whom he played until his retirement in 2005.
I met Nakata once, in his sleek, low-lit office in central Tokyo where I went to interview him about a very expensive sake he was launching. He wanted to help brand sake better internationally so that foreigners could understand it, he told me. This is not a bad idea as sake labels are, to my eyes, totally impenetrable. It made sense to try to make the products of individual sake breweries more easily identifiable, to help build loyalty among those, like me, who were relatively ignorant about Japan’s national drink. The only real flaw with his sake-branding scheme was that his own sake cost about £800 a bottle. Anyway, Nakata also casually mentioned the fact that he never, ever ate vegetables, not so much as a bean sprout – hence, I suppose, his affection for the meat-only Yanagiya.
Our meal ends with a cast-iron nabe pot hung from a hook above the fire. In it is a dashi made with katsuobushi and roasted duck bones into which have been placed more pieces of duck and steamed vegetables. It is served with some rice but, by that stage, we are deliriously full and cannot eat any more.
‘I have a difficult time trying to think of a restaurant that is better,’ says Lissen while Yamada-san is out of earshot in another room. Emil thinks he knows a few that are better, but Asger strikes a conciliatory chord: ‘For what it does, I can imagine it is the best in the world. It is definitely in the lower half of my top ten.’
Instead of an interminable bus ride home, Yamada kindly has the restaurant’s driver take us back to the nearest station from where we catch a train to our hotel in Nagoya. There we spend a restless night digesting what might very well be a contender for, if not the most refined cuisine in Japan, certainly one of its best dining experiences.
Chapter 19
Insects
I am lying, prone and embedded in a pile of snow dressed in a neon romper suit, limbs splayed randomly like a figure in a Keith Haring drawing. I have just contrived to poke the end of one of my skis in one of my eyes. Bits of me hurt that I wasn’t aware existed, although I have yet to finalise an inventory of precisely which bits. It goes without saying that all dignity has long been surrendered to the slopes.
Lissen has just swooshed by, momentarily shifting into reverse to get a better look at her prostrate husband, before heading on down the mountain. Asger, more slowly, but completely in control, used me as a slalom marker in his measured descent of the Hakuba resort hill, which was rubbing things in somewhat. And that blurry flash of colour? That was Emil, taking the direct route without so much as a glance of concern in the direction of his stricken father.
Our time in Nagano, our next stop following our Yanagiya meal, had beg
un so very much more enjoyably. As I lie in the snow, I wish we were back in Tsumago eating oyaki – buckwheat dumplings the size of tennis balls. They were nice. Tsumago is an immaculately preserved medieval village up in the hills along the old Kyoto–Edo Nakasendo Highway. It was the first town in Japan to be preserved as an historic site and so its 200-year-old houses and shops, some with the original wooden tiled roofs laden with stones to keep them from blowing away in storms, are now a major tourist attraction. That was also nice.
This is not nice. Something hurts. I think it is my ankle, but the shock of my first skiing accident, which occurred at such a rudely early stage in my first ever skiing lesson, has left me somehow disconnected from my body. I decide to remain lying here in the snow, very still, for a little longer, and think instead about the snow monkeys.
Genuine Japanese icons, the macaques of Jigokudani Wild Monkey Park had been on my must-see list in Japan for years and, despite the crowds of eager photographers surrounding their man-made hot spring pool like paparazzi given access to the Kardashians’ jacuzzi, they did not disappoint. I had particularly enjoyed the story of their mysterious disappearance a few months earlier. Nobody had seen a single one of the 200 or so monkeys at their beloved hot pool for ten days until researchers venturing further up into the mountain forests had found the whole lot of them engaged in what could only be described as a gigantic monkey orgy. Concerned about the impact this mass frottage-related absenteeism was having on tourist income, locals had to tempt them back down to the pond with food.
We’d visited Matsumoto Castle, an immense, black, six-storey wooden pagoda, the oldest fortress in Japan, which we had seen on a perfect winter’s day with not a cloud in the endless blue sky and crows wheeling on the thermals above its jagged roof. We had posed with locals dressed as samurai in the park and eaten an astonishing meal at a restaurant nearby which served horsemeat, various cuts – belly, artery, heart – as sashimi, all of them delicious apart from the yellowy-white slices of rubbery ‘mane fat’. Though none of us had a problem eating horse – ‘It’s not really a pet like a cat, is it?’ as Emil put it – that mane fat was a bit a challenge.
Horsemeat consumption, which has traditionally been high in Nagano, has been cited as one reason for the locals’ longevity. The people of Nagano have now overtaken the Okinawans as the longest-lived people in Japan. Nagano’s men have an average life expectancy of just over eighty years, women over eighty-seven years. Horsemeat has a third as many calories and an eighth the fat of beef or pork, but the longevity of the Naganoites is more likely attributable to the fact that they also eat more vegetables than the average Japanese. Or was it perhaps another Nagano speciality, the main reason for us coming to Nagano – the local insect cuisine, which we had tried the day before in Ina City, to the south of the prefecture?
We are increasingly being told that the world is going to need to source more of its protein and vitamins from insects. If we are to solve the challenge of feeding seven or eight billion people with something other than methane-producing cows or antibiotic-filled pigs. We are going to have to overcome our squeamishness about eating things with six or more legs, as many others in the rest of the world – South America, Africa, Australia – did millennia ago. After all, really, what’s the difference between an insect and a shrimp, or a lobster come to that? Environmentally, there can be little argument. It takes 1,500 litres of water to produce one kilo of beef; you can harvest ten times as many insects for the same and, per kilo, insect meat (insect flesh? We need a word for it, don’t we?) has more protein than chicken meat.
‘There has been a big increase in people interested in our locusts,’ edible insect specialist Yasuharu Tsukuhara had told us when we visited his eighty-year-old, family-run restaurant and shop on the outskirts of this large city on a mountain plain. ‘More are buying live locusts to cook themselves at home. Some days we are selling five or six kilos.’ Recent appearances by Tsukuhara on TV shows prompted by a United Nations conference on the subject had further boosted awareness of this Nagano speciality in Japan but the prefecture was already famous as the centre of insect eating, or ‘entomophagy’. For centuries they have eaten bee larvae, locusts, sanagi (silk worm pupa) and the most expensive insect delicacy, zazamushi (river- or ‘Dobson flies’, at ¥1,200, £9, for 25g). Insects were never a major food source for Nagano, but during leaner times they have been an important dietary supplement, particularly for the poor.
The insects are usually served as a preserved food, cooked tsukudani-style in soy sauce, salt, mirin and sugar. Judging by the display in the cabinet in Tsukuhara’s shop, they look like weird caramelised snacks, apart from the bee larvae which resemble plump grains of wild rice, some light brown, some dark. But then I caught sight of some gruesome, maggoty-type things with lots of legs and fangs. They were not so appealing; in fact, his cabinet was beginning to bring back an unwelcome memory of an insect restaurant I once visited in Hanoi. The bee larvae there were not at all nice but I had been properly traumatised by a plate of bitter, black scorpions. They were like eating plastic egg boxes filled with soggy sawdust. There’s your ‘difference between lobster’ right there.
Tsukuhara, a straight-backed, broad-faced man, is something of a celebrity in international entomophagy circles. On a recent appearance at an insect eaters’ conference in Holland he sold all the insects he had brought within minutes. (Improbably, Holland is the biggest insect consumer in Europe: I’ve actually seen insect ‘meatballs’ in its supermarket chains there.) He regularly travels to other countries with similar insect-eating traditions, visiting Laos often. ‘Children there can gather three to five kilos a day!’ he marvelled.
He harvests the insects from the rice paddies, as people have done in this part of Japan for centuries. In Kyushu, too, they have a tradition of eating bee larvae, while further north in Tohoku they prefer locusts. In Nagano during the Edo period, the cry of the door-to-door insect vendor was apparently as common as the tofu seller’s.
‘Elementary school children and grandparents used to gather a lot of locusts in the rice fields in Miyagi [whose coast was struck by the tsunami in 2011], sometimes seven or eight tons a day,’ he added. ‘But since the nuclear disaster their parents won’t let them. Now we get them from the wild in Yamagata Prefecture instead.’ The bee larvae harvest has also had its challenges recently. He had noticed that the bees were moving north, perhaps nudged by rising temperatures in their usual habits. ‘We used to get the larvae from Hiroshima, but not any more. Now we are seeing them in Hokkaido more and more.’ Pesticides are yet another enemy of the insect gourmet, for obvious reasons.
We had been brought to Ina City by a kind contact at the local tourist board. As Tsukuhara and I chatted over a cup of Laotian silkworm shit tea – made from the excreta of silkworms fed exclusively on mulberry leaves – I looked up from my notebook to see that two photographers, a cable TV cameraman and two journalists, apparently invited by the tourist board man to observe the cartoon family eat insects, had silently sidled into the café and were now recording everything intently. Discussing the nuances of infused silkworm excrement (it has a light, acidic flavour, not bad at all; as Tsukuhara puts it, ‘You would never think it was shit’) while being scrutinised by a room full of strangers seemed to me the very definition of awkward.
I ploughed on with my questions and we all tried some silkworm larvae. The larvae looked like toasted maggots and had a plasticky carapace which, once broken, revealed a soft, mealy interior tasting not unpleasantly of peanuts. The locusts, our next sample, had a mild prawn flavour. Their bellies were soft but I struggled with their spiky limbs. We adjourned to Tsukuhara’s kitchen where, alongside two deep, broad cooking pots the size of christening fonts in which he stews insects in soy sauce and mirin, he took a smaller pan and fried up some bee larvae in margarine, with salt and pepper. Though Lissen was troubled by the threat eating the eggs of bees poses to their already beleaguered population, they had a not unpleasant delicate nut
ty-chickeny aftertaste.
And there could hardly be a better advert for entomophagy than Tsukuhara and his family. He told me he was seventy-one years old, but if he had said fifty-one I would have believed him. His son, Shinya, forty-one, has taken over the day-to-day running of the company. His mother, Harumi, now ninety-nine, was until recently very much involved too.
‘She is the most important part of this family,’ he said, showing us a newspaper cutting with her photograph. Her cherubic face radiated good health. ‘She is like our god.’
Tsukuhara, in a back-to-front baseball cap and sleeveless puffa jacket, clearly had no intention of retiring; he is still researching, making new discoveries, new insect innovations. ‘We are working hard to spread insect cuisine, working with universities to explain the benefits of eating them, healthwise and for the environment, and to get people to be more mindful that insects are an important part of nature, not just a pest to be killed with chemicals.’
He had plans to introduce new insects to the Japanese food chain: ‘I am thinking about trying to sell stinkbugs. In South Africa they sometimes put them in bread. I know that they don’t sound that good and they have that unique smell, but that’s what gives them a special flavour. I cannot explain how delicious they are.’
I wondered if he had heard about some of the more avant-garde restaurants in Europe, Australia and South America which have recently been putting insects on the menu. A few years ago in Copenhagen, at restaurant Noma’s first MAD FoodCamp Symposium, onstage I introduced the Brazilian chef Alex Atala of restaurant DOM in São Paulo, who finished his talk by offering tastings of live ants. We were invited to squish them and then taste them: they had a wonderful flavour of ginger and lime. Afterwards, Noma began serving ants on a raw prawn as a kind of seasoning and, since then, the restaurant’s experimental laboratory has also created a kind of fish sauce made from fermented locusts.
The Meaning of Rice Page 16