The Reach of a Chef

by Michael Ruhlman

  Even Reichl had made the point that Masa had in a way created a dream—“to own a restaurant where he can feed perfect food made with the best ingredients money can buy to a few discerning diners”—one that no other chef in Los Angeles had been able to achieve quite that way.

  “What made you think you could get away with it?” I asked.

  “I didn’t care,” he said. “I just charged them…. Very small restaurant. People come. People get it, they come; people don’t get it, don’t come.

  “Some people accumulate the money a little bit all year,” he continued, recalling a specific customer who would save and save for her annual meal. “Old woman. ‘Masa, I come here once a year.’ Herself. Not fancy.” The thought of this woman, who saved all year each year for one of his meals, here in the dimly lit, quiet restaurant, moves him, and I see he is about to cry. He rubs his eyes to stop himself. “That’s all we can do, you know. A hundred percent. That kind of face, when I see, I love. I’m soooo happy what I did. I spend a long time working. This is my best customer. Even no money. They understand. That’s why I can do.”

  It is an indication of his refinement as a sushi chef, perhaps, that he will not eat sushi in New York. He has gotten sick twice from eating sushi in this sushi-adoring city, and that’s enough for him. There is no consistent training here, he says. In Japan, a chef must train for at least three years before he could even think of getting licensed, and then the chef takes his blowfish exam in order to serve this delicacy that can be fatal if not properly prepared. So Masa sticks to Korean restaurants and places that serve simple food. He can’t stand the kind of food served by his fellow four-stars. It’s confusing to him. It’s too salty. There’s too much butter. A dish that requires the work of five people doesn’t make sense.

  Krispy Kremes, though, they’re another matter. “I love Krispy Kremes,” he says, almost woozy with lust. He brings them in himself on Saturday mornings.

  Japanese cuisine has two main branches: the samurai branch, rustic, farmer cuisine; and the Zen branch, which is the branch Masa works. Both forms are about simplicity rather than complexity. He tries to teach his staff, “my kids,” he calls them, what this food is all about: “Very delicate,” he says. He wants them to appreciate the beauty of the cherry blossom. This is what his food is all about. If you can understand this, the attributes of a cherry blossom, then you can understand his food.

  In L.A., Nick planned to prepare a special meal for his family at the restaurant during its day off. He wanted the table adorned with cherry blossoms. He slaved all day in preparation for this meal, which was to be a gift. As the hour of their arrival approached, he saw that the cherry blossoms were fading and becoming old-looking and brown. He had too much work and not enough time, but more important he had to find beautiful flowers; he drove into downtown Los Angeles from Rodeo Drive to make sure the cherry blossoms were right. “Very delicate.”

  What Masa eats at his own restaurant is another example of what he appreciates—samurai food. As his staff leaned against counters in the kitchen eating family meal, Masa usually took his lunch on the cardboard-covered hinoki, where I joined him twice. On one day, we ate a broth flavored by the dark seaweed kombu, with soba noodles and a fried vegetable pancake floating on top. The other lunch was something I’d never had. A variety of fish tails, scraps from butchering, grilled or deep fired, and a bowl of marinated squid guts. The guts looked in my bowl like soupy pink spaghetti, and they had a tangy, fermented flavor. I’m pretty adventurous as far as what I’ll eat, but fish entrails, fermented or not, would not ordinarily be something I’d be excited about. Masa ate them and wanted to serve them to me, though, and so I looked forward to it. Everything to that point I’d tasted had been excellent at least, if not quite a bit beyond excellent. Every single thing I’d ever had there. The squid guts were no different—they tasted really good, the texture and flavor fascinating, like tasting a new form of blue cheese. This was the nature of food at Masa.

  When a fish order arrived from Japan, everyone got quickly to work breaking down eels and flat fish and round fish and shrimp to get them properly prepped and stored. Masa took the octopus leg to work on. The three-foot-long appendage was speckled brown and fat as a baseball bat at its severed end. It was so fresh its big suckers on the pale underside were still contracting gently and the muscle still twitched. Masa skinned it quickly and expertly cut a couple of pieces and gave me one. It had a strange, sweet, sea flavor, but more, its texture was new and surprising as well, chewy on the outside and gelatinous on the inside. He would serve this as sashimi or sushi, sometimes lightly grilled for a little flavor and with a few drops of sudachi. Again, I’d tasted something that was wonderfully new.

  After Masa ate, usually by himself, he would smoke a cigar in his dark restaurant and draw food and dishes and think about food. (“Think about food all day long—it’s fun!” he says.) He continues to enjoy drawing, as he has throughout his life. Many of the ceramic plates, dishes, and bowls he designed himself. In the spotlight above the bar, his bald head glowing, the blue smoke rising from a fat cigar, he looks like an Asian Mafia don perusing a stack of notes and betting slips, but he’s really thinking about new dishes and new ways to serve his food. The shabu-shabu dish is one such piece he designed: a dark brown roughly glazed orblike bowl on a small platform in which he serves piping hot kombu broth. Beside this is a small tray with a few thin slices of raw lobster and raw foie gras. You dip the lobster and foie in the broth using chopsticks, swish-swish for a few seconds to cook them, and then eat them. When I had this dish, I remember thinking that I never wanted to eat foie gras again any other way—what was the point?

  Masa conceived of serving foie gras this way after a customer brought him from Scotland a fresh monkfish liver, which is a lot like the fattened duck liver. It was so fresh and good that he puzzled over how best to cook it. As delicately as possible, he thought. The shabu idea worked so well, it’s become a staple dish.

  The next course will simply be the kombu broth, which now has been flavored by the lobster and has drops of gold fat from the foie gras floating on its surface. It’s beautiful to look at and delicious to eat, a work of great simplicity and efficiency. All hallmarks of Masa’s food.

  The previous spring, I’d traveled to Baltimore to be part of a three-person writers’ panel at the annual International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) conference. Bourdain was also on this panel, and he made some tongue-in-cheek remarks about him and me touring as a kind of culinary Martin and Lewis—something that would be very bad for my health. It’s part of his evil nature that he is enormously charming in person and somehow convinces you that it’s not only OK but, in fact, a great opportunity to take up smoking again, and to stay out till dawn pounding beers with grizzled Vietnam vets who insist on buying the celebrity yet another round, the night before our eight A.M. panel discussion. Just when you’re certain the guy’s a deceptive scoundrel who cannot be trusted, is bad for your physical health and Midwestern integrity, he undoes you with an incredibly generous blurb for your cookbook.

  So, early in the evening in Baltimore, well before I began to see double, he mentioned he was writing an article on Masa and had a rez in a couple weeks. He’d already been once but had been so seduced by the food that he had no idea what had happened; in fact, he’d become so enraptured by the experience that he had no notes whatsoever and thus could not write his story. So he was returning with our mutual friend Eric Ripert, arguably the most knowledgeable fish cook in the city.

  I was by chance going to be in the city on that date, preparing to watch the reopening of Per Se. I begged to be able to join them. He said he’d see what he could do.

  I truly wanted to be wary of Bourdain, but how, when it was he who first delivered me to the hinoki altar, and more: He picked up the tab for all three of us, which would be $1,300 (that’s without the three bottles of wine sent to us as a gift from a friend).

  Eating at Masa was one of t
he most original and extraordinary dining experiences I’d had. It was second in power only to my experience at the French Laundry, which had been, because of its timing in my life, right up there with losing my virginity, if not actually divine in some small way.

  That said, I believe Masa is the most exciting fine-dining experience in Manhattan, period. By far. Maybe in the world.

  The room is peaceful and refined, and when you sit at the bar you cannot help but rub your palms over it, it feels so sensual—you’ve never felt wood like this before. Masa simply walks out (the night we were there, he wore a loose blue shirt and an apron over loose trousers, wood clogs), nods, and starts serving. He mixes some cucumber salad and serves it with crayfish and the meal is begun. Next comes the signature toro with caviar, served with rectangles of toast, followed by bonito sashimi wrapped in daikon radish, soft-shell crab tempura, the lobster-and-foie shabu dish. And then the sushi begins, served by hand, eaten by hand. Two couples were seated on either side of us. Masa fed them as well, assisted by Kei on his right and Nick on his left.

  He uses a long, slender knife with a carved handle made from the horn of a water buffalo, a beautiful object in itself. Before service he has sharpened it on a ceramic stone using lots of water, and rubbing it back and forth hard as if he were scrubbing the stone. He then washes his hands and thoroughly scrubs his nails with a brush. His movements are clean and fine, the apotheosis of grace and craftsmanship. When he cut the aji, he left on a thin swath of silver-blue skin. The skin remaining on the board had an artful pattern cut out of it—even his garbage looked beautiful. He then folded the mackerel over a pillow of rice with some fresh wasabi. Mackerel is something I’ve always associated with cat food and was not something I thought you wanted to eat raw. But Bourdain beside me was already making low-moan ecstasy noises. Indeed, the fish was smooth and sweet and buttery. Mackerel? This was not the world I knew.

  The sushi also included the saltwater and ocean eel called anago, a sushi roll packed with a massive mouthful of o-toro, the fattiest part of this fatty part of the tuna. (Masa’s tuna, the toro and the akami, the leaner part of the tuna, arrive frozen and are kept in a Thermo freezer, a serious piece of equipment Masa keeps at–87 degrees Fahrenheit.) We had grilled toro as well. A grilled shiitake, served on sushi rice like fish, whose texture ingeniously mirrored the fish. Sea urchin, a scallop that he tenderized by crosshatching it with his knife, sweet clam, calamari, shrimp, Kobe beef grilled so that when you bit into it, fat felt like it was pouring out of the meat. And it concluded with some sweet eel, freshwater unagi.

  There was more to the genius I realized only after he asked if we would like something else. Greedily, I wanted to taste the shima aji, which had come early in the sushi service. It had been my favorite of the sushi courses. But when I tasted it at the end of the meal, it wasn’t the same, it had lost its shine somehow. Masa had known not only exactly how but also when to serve this fish. It was critical to submit absolutely to Masa.

  Masa is at ease and casual at his station, talking every now and then or answering a question in his broken English or grunting like a parody of a Japanese wrestler. He joined us with a glass of each of the wines we drank. He was working, but he conveyed that he was enjoying the work.

  Midway through the meal, Bourdain, in o-toro ecstasy, said, “Put a gun to my head and shoot me right now. I’d be fine with that. I’d die a happy man. You know that at this moment no one on earth is eating better than we are.”

  And it was, I believed, actually true.

  “Have you had enough?” he asked finally. We accepted that we had. He said, “Thank you very much.”

  Reentering the mall after such otherworldly refinement jarred the senses. We made it to a relaxed hangout of Eric’s and talked about the meal, and it was interesting to hear what other chefs thought of this guy.

  Ripert had been to Per Se the night before and had, before we’d begun our meal at Masa, exclaimed in a rapturous whisper, “I think Per Se might be the best restaurant in the world.” He’d had a good meal evidently, but what he had just experienced at Masa was unquestionably new.

  “It is the antithesis of what Thomas is doing next door,” he said. “Thomas gives you extraordinary sophistication and luxury, and Masa, he has a piece of wood and some chopsticks and a bucket of steamed rice, some china he made himself.” Eric shook his head. “I think it’s genius.” Masa was a master, and the culture he was bringing to New York was extraordinary, Eric said.

  Bourdain, too, remained reverential: “That’s what he does—he turns everything we do, everything we know, on its head. What he is saying is, You know nothing.”

  Masa is very much in control, not just of the food but of the entire environment in his restaurant. Arriving guests are asked to turn off their cell phones. He doesn’t want to hear them or hear people talking on them. “That make me pissed off very much,” he says. He will actually get angry during service if it happens. “Hey,” he’ll say. “Shut up with telephone, otherwise I smash your telephone. Another person in the private room—‘Hey, what you do? Get out of here! Make your phone call outside.’” Usually people apologize, he says. “I want people to enjoy this environment, this world. No telephone, forget it. Like Disneyland, you step into a different world, see?”

  Anything that cuts into this environment makes his performance more difficult. It is just that, a performance. Chef Benno had remarked on this more than the food. When Masa asked if he enjoyed the meal, he had replied, “It was a real inspiration to watch you.”

  “It’s part of the show,” Masa says of his presence. “That’s why I can charge three-fifty. If sit in some private dining room, they just see the dish, I cannot charge three-fifty.”

  “Everyday it’s a fight,” he says later. “If they like, I win; if they don’t like, I lose. If they don’t like, I get very pissed off.”

  And this: “I want to see the people eat. Joy. I want hear them say, ‘Wow!’”

  If Masa cannot make it into the restaurant, his assistant will call their reservations and cancel them all. “When I catch cold, I close the restaurant,” he says.

  I asked how he stayed healthy and maintained the energy to cook and perform six days a week, often twice a day.

  “Don’t eat too much!” he says, and then laughs his deep, long, exuberant laugh. “HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa! Go to sleep! HaHaHaHa-HaHaHaHaHaHa!”

  Masa is easy and funny when he’s not working. When I was commenting on some of the dishes he served, he said, “Simple right? HaHa-HaHaHa! Thomas works so hard.” He makes an expression of mock pity. “I’m lazy!”

  Every now and then he’ll compose a complex dish with multiple components. The current fugu dish is an example. Fugu, or blowfish, is in season in the fall. The liver of the wild blowfish can contain toxins that are lethal, and the entire fish must be carefully prepared by licensed chefs. The blowfish Masa uses are not wild but rather are grown in their environment in large pens and are not dangerous. The toxin, Masa explained, originates in the shellfish that blowfish eat. The pen they’re raised in keeps the shellfish out. But as they remain in their natural habitat, and are farmed seasonally, the penned blowfish have the same flavor as wild.

  For the fugu dish, he serves the flesh as sushi, three different parts of its skin (each has a different texture), its intestine cleaned and cooked and stuffed with green onion, and a piece of its liver. Later in the meal he will serve chunks of the head deep-fried—Kei says, “It’s so good. It’s like fried chicken”—served with a ponzu-like vinaigrette.

  With all those components and the heavily worked-over fish, I say, “That’s kind of like a Thomas dish.” He nods gravely and says, “I copied.”

  Masa doesn’t use only Japanese ingredients. Many of the clams come from around here, the scallops too. And the ginkgo nuts come from a tree in Central Park. Masa smelled them during a walk. Their thick, soft shell has an intensely funky, unpleasant odor, but shelled, cooked, and skinned, the inner nut is delic
ious, sweet, and nutty tasting. He serves them as they are, the way you’d serve olives or cashews before the meal. I’d never had anything like them. His grill chef Ryan Becze goes out and gathers them from the park after lunch service.

  Ginkgo nuts Masa knew from Japan, but the origins of any ingredient are less important than that they fit into a Japanese style. “It doesn’t matter, Western ingredients, Japanese ingredients,” he says, “only matter good ingredient—good stuff.” He will batter and deep-fry an entire golf ball–sized white truffle, wrap it in rice paper, and serve it as a single course.

  And this is partly the reason for the high cost. Not only does he make abundant use of the very expensive ingredients common in pricey restaurants, such as foie, truffle, and caviar, almost all of the ingredients are very expensive. The shrimp he uses, for instance, arrive live, packed in damp wood chips, and cost twenty dollars apiece, a high food cost for one item. “Even in Japan they can’t do this way,” he says. “So expensive.”

  I think I’m getting a handle on Masa, and I say, “You have the most expensive restaurant in the biggest restaurant city in the world, and you say the most important thing you do, the most important thing, is ordering the food.”

  Masa takes a sip of his tea and nods. “Very easy job.”

  “Really, you’re just a crafty old cook. You figured out a way to charge the most money of any chef in the country, maybe the world, and you don’t even cook.”

  He grins wide. “Nice, right?” he says, nodding vigorously and smiling. “Nice huh? HaHaHaHaHaHa! HaHaHaHaHaHa!”

  I asked Masa the art-versus-craft question. I used to think that only in the rarest of circumstances did the chef rise above being a craftsman into the realm of the artist. Most chefs who claimed to be artistes were full of it as far as I was concerned. Only when a chef changed the way you saw the world, through cooking, did food truly become art, and that was rare, indeed. But also I was softening on the subject—the restaurant world was so diverse and food was changing so fast, I was willing to concede some ground on the artist issue, especially having spent so much time with Achatz at Trio.