Justifiable? I leave that question to accountants and ethicists. Worth it? The answer depends on your budget and priorities. But in my experience, the silky, melting quality of Masa’s toro and uni and sea bream, coupled with the serenity of its ambience, does not exist in New York at a lower price.
Concluding not lightly but seriously, he wrote: “Masa is divine.”
You enter Masa off the polished marble floors of the mall, pass through a dark curtain into a small black vestibule, and through a large wood door, a huge rough piece of cedar, twenty-five hundred years old, and feel immediately that it is an alternate universe from the one you’ve just left.
The restaurant is boxy and small, its walls painted black, but it does not feel claustrophobic; instead, it feels open and comfortable. The long, thick slab of hinoki—the bar, a soft, pale, fragrant cypress wood—seems to glow in the spotlights, and runs almost the length of the main room. Beside this room, separated by small bamboo curtains, are four tables seating four each. With ten seats at the bar, one night’s capacity seating is twenty-six. Across the bar are some low cases that will hold fish during service, but not much, and they are not so tall as to block the view of Masa’s workstation. Masa has a large round, shaved head, a solid athletic build, and an easy smile. He always wears a loose Japanese shirt, loose cotton pants beneath his long apron, and on his feet he wears either clogs or sandals. Behind Masa’s station is a large floral arrangement he creates with seasonal plants—viburnum, forsythia, pussy willow, maple—and scattered bamboo in a pot in a shallow pool of water just inches deep. The sound of trickling water is distinct and peaceful. On each side of where Masa stands for service are stations that will be worked by Keinosuke Kawakami, age thirty-two, and Nick Kim, twenty-nine. Nick is from Korea but grew up in Los Angeles. Kei is from Fukuoka, Japan, and has been in the States for eight years, four of them with Masa, his only chef’s job. Nick and Kei do most of the prepping and will also cut and serve sushi during busy services. There is a small grill behind them, called okudo-san, burning wood charcoal, for beef and mushrooms and for toasting the Ariake seaweed. There are two gas burners there for cooking as well. And in the far corner a discreet grill station, now manned by Ryan Becze, twenty-nine. Ryan, from Iowa, attended the New England Culinary Institute, but his compulsion to learn Japanese cuisine was kindled during two years in Japan in a kaiseki restaurant, where he was allowed only to wash dishes at first and where he lived off fish heads and daikon tops.
And that’s the core kitchen staff at what may be the most expensive restaurant in the United States.
I put on a kitchen jacket and brought knives, should I need them, but this was obviously a kitchen where I’d be allowed to wash dishes, maybe. I was, however, welcome to hang out and watch. Jacob Silver, a banquet chef in Honolulu and a friend of Nick’s, had asked to trail, or stage, for a few days while he was in town. I asked Jacob if he was learning a lot and he said, “I’m not learning a lot—I’m seeing a lot.” There was so much to see and to observe.
Fortunately, Nick and Kei were forthcoming and helpful in describing verbally everything they did, even as they were continually moving and working. Nick opens the long, narrow kitchen around nine, works steadily till opening, then participates in service, then cleans, and can usually leave shortly after midnight, six days a week. He says, “I try not to take a break, otherwise I might not get up.”
There were several other cooks in the kitchen who worked for Bar Masa, on the other side, an informal Japanese restaurant that Masa also runs. (The Masa space is U-shaped, the kitchen being the bottom of the U.) But it was Kei and Nick who did the majority of butchering fish, peeling wasabi root, preparing the sauces, and making the rice for Masa.
Nick cooked the rice every night. He has a gentle, thoughtful disposition, and physically is like a smaller version of Masa himself. It was instructive simply to watch Nick scrubbing the rice, in a large steel bowl, using a gentle circular motion. He washed the rice and changed the water, washed it and washed it again, strained it into a colander. Finally, he submerged the colander in a large bowl of water and agitated it so that chunks and shards of broken rice fell through the mesh. These, he explained, could make the rice pasty. Cooking the rice is his daily job, and it’s both an honor and a source of anxiety.
“Until Taisho puts his hand in the rice warmer, I’m not comfortable,” he says, calling Masa by the Japanese word for “boss” (in the time of the samurai, taisho was the term for the leader of the samurai going in to fight, so the nuance of the term is apt). They’ve been getting in a different crop of sushi rice, and it hasn’t behaved the same. Also, he ran out of Evian water and so had to use their filtered tap water to cook the rice.
Nick’s been with Masa for less than two years, and even he thinks he’s too young and too green to be doing what he’s doing. “I shouldn’t be making sushi rice, I shouldn’t be cutting fish,” he says, adding, “Masa’s a great teacher and he’s been pushing me.”
When they cut fish, they typically do it on large oblong boards, single pieces of wood with rough edges cut straight from the ginkgo tree. They set this board over a sink, start a stream of cold water running over it, and begin cutting.
Often little needs to be done to a fish, but other times subtle manipulations are made. For the aji mackerel, which has a strong flavor, Nick removed the upper layer of skin but left the silver-blue sheen on the flesh. He removed the pinbones and laid the fillets, six of them, on a circular rack. He salted the fillets evenly and put them in the walk-in cooler, setting his timer. After twenty minutes, he retrieved the mackerel, rinsed and patted dry each fillet, all very delicately. He then dipped the fillets in rice vinegar, which will flavor the meat. “I find that after an hour or so,” he said, “it becomes more rounded, and when you cut it, it looks more natural.”
Nick next showed his friend Jacob how they prep the live lobster for the lobster risotto at Bar Masa, quickly removing the tail and claws from the body, halving the head, taking out the gills, wasting almost nothing. Nick moved the green tomalley, or liver, to a section of the board and quickly chopped the liquidy gland to a smooth paste, reserving this too. He’ll add a little salt (“to get rid of the nasty flavor”), then add some soy to season it. This would be used as the sauce for lobster sashimi.
Meanwhile, Kei prepped the hamo, a pike eel, Masa called it, shaped like an eel but different in taste and texture, then kawahagi, “like a triggerfish,” Kei said, wincing to think of an adequate translation. Most fish here is flown in from Japan. He then scraped the skin off a dozen wasabi roots, as Nick trimmed what he called a flounder. Kei said, “Fluke,” made the shape of the fish with his towel on the cutting board, and pointed to where the eyes were on a flounder versus a fluke.
Nick nodded and Kei moved on to the orange clams, opening a dozen, cleaning and trimming them, then putting them into a steel bowl. He brought some sake to a simmer and dumped it over the clams, sloshed them around to get the strong ocean taste out of them, then transferred them to an ice bath. He cut a piece for me, washed it in a sweet vinegar, gave it a drop of soy, and put it on a bit of rice. It was sweet and tasted of fresh ocean, and it made me smile.
Sauces truly were often as simple as that. Masa did make a few sauces based on soy, sake, and mirin. Nikiri soy might be reduced with sake or mirin and seaweed. White soy would be used in summer, as would a sauce flavored by red shiso leaf. Another sauce was vinegar flavored with tade, a spicy green leaf. In winter, he would use sauces based on dark soy. The eel got a special sauce called tsume—eel bones were grilled and cooked in sake, mirin, and soy. The sauce was never made from scratch but instead was continually replenished. Nick said the tsume sauce had been used for twenty years at the previous restaurants but was lost in transit to New York when the container broke.
Lunch service at Bar Masa, a conventional restaurant serving a broader Japanese menu, bustled around Nick and Kei as they moved through their day. To their right a couple of chefs cut and sent
out sushi for the lunch crowd. To their left, two cooks worked a hot line.
Masa occasionally does some of the prep but mainly sticks to service and running the business. He’ll prepare the toro, spending twenty minutes scraping it from the membrane (he’ll save the membrane to grill and eat for family meal later), transforming it into a kind of rich tuna mush that he’ll serve with a huge heap of osetra caviar before he begins the sushi service.
Recently he’s been getting the caviar from Per Se. Jonathan Benno, chef de cuisine there, had dinner at Masa the other night and had brought three 500-gram tins of Iranian osetra to the Masa kitchen himself.
Masa was at work at a board, removing the meat from the legs of a hairy crab by rolling them with a wood pestle, squeezing the flesh out through either end. Benno thanked Masa for the meal the other night.
“Did you enjoy?” Masa asked.
“It was a real inspiration to watch you,” Benno said.
To which Masa more or less grunted. Benno thanked him again, promised two more tins of caviar on Friday, then departed.
Other chefs accord Masa extraordinary respect of the kind Benno showed, every bit as much as they do Keller. So it was perhaps the only way to get Masa to move across the country and into a mall—a request from Keller.
According to Masa, he was working a chef’s event in Atlanta and so was Keller. The two got to talking. Keller told Masa what he was doing, opening a restaurant in New York in a building to be called the AOL Time Warner Center. Masa should open a restaurant there, too, Keller said. How about it?
In fact, Masa had long thought of opening in New York, but he couldn’t envision having two restaurants, and he didn’t want to leave Los Angeles. He’d had children and had been married. Now his kids were grown and he was divorced. Maybe it was the time to think about New York—the timing was right.
As part of the agreement for opening a restaurant in the Time Warner Center, Adam Block had asked for Keller to have the right to veto any potential restaurants in the building. In the beginning, Ken Himmel, CEO of Related Urban Development, had not foreseen a gathering of the country’s most elite chefs. Block said Related was considering a range of restaurants, including chains. Himmel agreed to Block’s request. Neither side thought much about this part of the agreement at the time. Related was more concerned about preventing Keller from opening a Bouchon or another new restaurant in Manhattan. But this condition turned out to be pivotal. Since Keller could veto any restaurant, he also now felt invested in the process. Certainly he didn’t want a chain restaurant next to his, and so it was up to him to find the chefs or restaurateurs he’d like in there.
Block said, “Who do you want?”
Keller said, “Masa.” Keller had eaten at Ginza Sushiko, and it had been one of the best meals of his life. (“A total involvement with the process and flavors,” Keller said, recalling what he’d liked so much. “You were engaged at every level.”)
Block went to see Masa. Masa had no business counsel or agent or anything, really—just his staff and his restaurant. Block would soon be representing Masa. Himmel flew to Los Angeles to eat at Ginza Sushiko, to talk with Masa and to show him the plans of the building.
Today Masa says, “I didn’t think long about it.”
With arguably the best American chef and the best Japanese sushi chef in the country in agreement to open restaurants next to each other in the Time Warner Center, restaurant space without street access suddenly seemed enticing. Vongerichten signed on. Block now felt that this was a good opportunity for his client Gray Kunz, who’d had four New York Times stars at Lespinasse, to make his return to Manhattan. Several people were considered for the fifth space, but ultimately Keller asked Charlie Trotter to join the group, and, after some grumbling about being the last asked to dance, Trotter, also represented by Block, said yes.
Of all these chefs, the most intriguing and curious was Masa Takayama. He would be one of only two chefs who would actually be at the restaurant full-time. Keller, Trotter, and Vongerichten all had multiple restaurants that would divide their time.* Masa would earn four stars by cut ting raw fish, serving it with rice, and charging more money than any restaurant in New York. Masa was a curiosity in the chef world.
“I am nothing,” he would say. And, “I am naked.” And, “I don’t do anything. Eighty percent of the work is just ordering the ingredients.” He means it, and it is true, if you include in that 80 percent, the knowing—knowing which ingredients to order and exactly what to do with them when they arrived. If so, then the other 20 percent comes from his hands.
Masa has no shortage of critics who can’t believe anyone has the gall to charge what was now, in truffle-and-blowfish season, $350 per person, to which a 20 percent gratuity was automatically added, for a total of $420 per person, before you even ordered bottled water, let alone dipped into the sake list.
His response can be seen as either equally arrogant or straightforward and logical: “If it’s too expensive, don’t come,” he says.
His business adviser, Block, says, “He is so uncaring about what the public thinks. He’s somebody who ignores the brand. He just knows, This is it, this is me, this is what I do.”
And so Masa is completely inflexible as far as what he will and will not do in terms of catering to the New York market, more so than any of the other Time Warner chefs. “But the good news,” Block says, “is that New Yorkers don’t have the same awareness of what he’s doing as they do with French food. So they’re gonna flock, because he’s got few seats, and because anyone who’s ever experienced Masa would agree it’s an amazing experience. It’s amazing, he’s amazing.”
Masayoshi Takayama was born on May 1, 1954, in Tochigi, Japan, an hour north of Tokyo. His family owned a fish shop and a catering business. Masa, the second of five children, worked at the shop while in high school. At eighteen, he says, he tried to go to the university, but didn’t last long. “Suddenly, I realized I was not interested,” he says, a couple of hours before service, seated at the $60,000 slab of hinoki, now completely covered with broken-down cardboard boxes. His accent is thick, his voice deep and rough, his cadence brusque. “To learn, to study, to be what? Businessman? I hated that.”
His older brother was working as an apprentice chef in Tokyo, and so, given that Masa didn’t have a better idea, he began working with his brother. His brother suggested he work in a sushi restaurant. Why not? Masa thought.
But the restaurant where he found work, a highly regarded 150-year-old restaurant called Ginza Sushi-ko, was run by a strict old man. Masa began by cleaning the bathroom and washing dishes—the way most apprentices started. Cleaning the bathroom was a serious job. When he moved into the kitchen, the work became only more difficult. “Very hard job,” Masa says. “Every day, every night, I tried to quit.” For two years, he wanted to quit. In his third year, he says, he started to learn things. And after five years he understood a new thing: He holds his hands up to me and says, “Here is my money.” He touches his chest, and says, “Here is my money.” But he knew, he says, “I had to polish myself, too. I worked hard, I studied.”
Finally, he thought that sushi chef might be the right job for him.
In addition to having become a sushi chef (in all it would take eight years of training), he also drew and painted. He drew many landscapes of his country, vistas filled with hills and trees, which was all that he saw. He’d heard that landscapes by Americans his age were of big, flat, wide-open spaces. He wanted to see this. A customer at Ginza Sushi-ko had a business residence in Los Angeles and urged Masa to use it. Masa did. Masa wanted to see the big, flat land, and so he was told to go to Las Vegas. He did and he saw the desert.
Masa moved to the United States for the landscape. And for golf. He loves golf, and it was cheaper to golf in L.A. than it was in Tokyo. In L.A., he worked for a few restaurants before opening a small restaurant of his own in a strip mall on Wilshire Boulevard, which he named after the Japanese restaurant where he trained.
When he opened, there was not much fine fresh fish. Where he had trained, they used only very good fish from the waters surrounding Japan. But in Los Angeles, he couldn’t get the same quality. So he told his fish purveyor, “Hey, buy from Japan.” The purveyor shook his head and said, “Too expensive.” Masa responded. “No, I buy.” He developed good customers, many of them Japanese businessmen who knew how good this fish was and were willing to pay for it. He didn’t need many, relatively speaking. He only had ten seats at the bar. And so he worked quietly and well, in relative obscurity, for several years.
“Then Ruth came,” he says.
He was in the car on the way to the golf course when he saw the small restaurant item, just two hundred words, in the Los Angeles Times.
“When I first walked into this sushi bar,” wrote Ruth Reichl, the paper’s restaurant critic, “hidden in an unprepossessing strip mall in the mid–Wilshire District, I didn’t know I was about to order the most expensive meal I had ever eaten in Los Angeles.”
She pronounced the food sublime. “But what fish it turned out to be! Perfect slices of pink abalone. The richest tuna I’d ever tasted. An orange-and-purple clam that looked like a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe. Sea urchins that were bigger, fatter than any I’d ever encountered. The meal went on and on, ending with two giant strawberries. And a bill for $100.”
Wow! he thought, amazed. That my restaurant!
At the time, the early 1990s, the fanciest, most expensive sushi dinner you could buy was about forty dollars. At two and a half times this, Reichl said, Masa was a bargain. She would return to give the restaurant a full review, but the first piece seems to be what began Masa’s notoriety regarding his expensive fish and rice dinners.
The Reach of a Chef Page 32