In Tokyo, Mixologizing with the Seasons

Gen Yamamoto, ready for business.

One of the best parts of a highlight-filled trip to Tokyo recently was dropping in on Bar Gen Yamamoto. Gen joined David Bouley's New York City team in late 2010 and the following April helped open Brushstroke, Bouley's French-tinged play on kaiseki cuisine. There, he specialized in fruit- and vegetable-based cocktails that were remarkable for their elegance and subtlety. I was a fan in New York, and curious to see what new concoctions the gifted mixologist had up his freshly-pressed sleeve in Tokyo.

He's set up his welcoming eight-seat bar in Azabu-Juban, a neighborhood where remnants of old Japan collide with  embassies, cafes and an international mix of residents. To the delight of his followers, he's also extended his range with a cocktail list that serves as a guide to the agrarian bounty of his native country.

We tried a four-course tasting menu (¥4,200, six-course is ¥5,800) which started with a refreshing mix of cucumber from Ibaraki, Kumamoto cantaloupe, Okinawa hiba-chi pepper, and Kawabe rice shochu. The latter is from a region in Kumamoto Prefecture known for its pristine waters.

 Fruit opener: cucumber, cantaloupe, hiba-chi pepper, rice shochu.

Full of beans: Ehime fava, kinome, junmai ginjo Raifuku.

Excited about the range of produce he has access to from all over Japan, Gen raves about the softness the tomato water he extracts from Ishiyama tomatoes that are now in season. He pays close attention to the condition of each tomato, and depending on variables such as when in the season they are picked and when in the tasting service he places it, he may use one of seven different tomato cocktail recipes. "The main thing is that I'm always looking for improvement and trying to surprise my guests," he says. The one we sampled included both fresh tomato, a housemade confiture of tomato, shiso and Rives Spanish gin. 

Not your mom's bloody Mary: Tomato cocktail

Another of Gen's finds is raw Kumano dogwood honey. The trees' flowers produce enough honey for bees to collect only every four years, resulting in a denseness of flavor that he likes combined with Ehime new summer orange (the flavor of which is somewhere between yuzu, grapefruit and lemon), mint and Torikai rice shochu.

The "dessert" course: summer orange, Kumano honey, mint, rice shochu 

Gen himself brings to mind a latter-day Jeeves, an unflappable master of his trade who never seems to break a sweat. While he is tall and lean, however, his creations are uniquely round and soft. They don't deliver the blunt alcoholic KO that many drinkers seek, but creep up on you in stockinged feet; their impact can therefore come as a surprise at the end of the evening. 

The room Gen has created is remarkable as well, anchored by an beautiful, broad bar fashioned from a 500-year-old Japanese oak (mizunara) tree. Beige walls and minimal adornment complete the setting, making Bar Gen Yamamoto a soothing refuge where you can relax and converse with your fellow guests and host while sampling his quietly astonishing cocktails.

Bar Gen Yamamoto
1-6-4 Azabu-Juban
Minato-ku Tokyo 
03-6434-0652
website: www.genyamamoto.jp

   

My Japan Airlines Foot Massage

I haven't flown Japan Airlines in a long time, so had not seen this particular airborne customer perk before. At the back of the plane en route to Tokyo,  where all the parents with jumpy kids and restless adults mill about during the 13-hour flight, this reflexology map of the foot was posted:

Right below it, I found this bamboo segment, upon which you massage the above outlined pressure points.

I had to wait in line for my turn, and when I hopped on the bamboo half-cylinder, found that it can be a challenge to zero in on minute points such as  #4 and #5. I  did my best, though, and my organs and other bodily parts thanked me for my efforts. Since my total travel time to Saga Prefecture, Kyushu was 25 hours, I can only imagine what kind of shape I would have been in at trip's end without this ki-enhancing interlude.

Takashi Inoue: Putting the 'Variety' in Variety Meats

Chef Takashi: Recently featured looking very sharp on the pages of GQ.

 Reporting on and eating horumon--innards and variety meats--at Takashi restaurant in the West Village was my recent fun assignment for Edible Manhattan, resulting in this article. Conceived by Osaka-born chef Takashi Inoue and general manager Saheem Ali, the restaurant specializes in yakiniku (Japanese grilled meat), with the subspecialty of horumon. 

Artist Aya Hasegawa's charming murals, which Takashi commissioned
to make horumon less intimidating to American diners.

As the mural above (created by a friend of Takashi's, Osaka artist Aya Hasegawa) explains, the term horumon, the Japanese rendering of the English word "hormone," connotes stamina and vigor. The mural posits that the name was an effort to re-brand off-cuts, though in many cultures eating organ meats is said to enhance virility. 

Yakiniku arrived in Japan along with the large numbers of Koreans who were conscripted during World War II and has been gaining in popularity ever since, especially after the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Takashi is a fourth-generation Korean Japanese whose grandmother ran a small yakiniku restaurant in Osaka. Growing up in his family and in a Korean neighborhood, he says, “My snack was horumon; it’s like a street food.” Today, he says, cow guts have gone so mainstream in Japan, “You can go to any supermarket and buy horumon, already marinated and in a ‘barbecue set.’”

When I arrived, Takashi and crew were in the middle of a photo shoot for a new dish he had come up with: squid ink rice with miso-marinated sweetbeads and spicy yuzu aioli. Preparing and primping the dish before a shoot is like putting it through hair and makeup; here, the lighting technicians and cameraman try to show the model off to best advantage.

Beef heart chili with grilled mochi (rice cake) and cheese. Sounds weird, but it's actually delicious.

Takashi's dishes are fresh and daring, and this is no exception: a combination of housemade smoked beef pancetta, baby whitebait fish and monkfish liver, done Spanish style in olive oil and garlic. It's cooked in a sardine tin.

The main attraction: tetchan, or large intestines, which many people consider the most delicious of the cow innards. Cooked on Takashi's super-hot electric grills, you can get the ideal texture:  crispy on the outside, tender on the inside. Itadakimasu!

The Experimental Cocktail Club Shines

I wasn't expecting a buffet of inventive cocktail wizardry at yesterday's Lucky Rice cocktail event at the Bowery Hotel, but that's just what it turned out to be, with eight establishments shaking and stirring to excess. These were my favorites, from the aptly named Experimental Cocktail Club.

The first was the Kho Tao, a mango-infused Cazadores Reposado tequila, Thai mango sticky rice custard, lime juice and young coconut cordial. A slurpee rethought by a mad mixo-culinary savant.
To read more about the guy behind ECC, Nico de Soto, check out this interesting interview on Heritage Radio.

The next, also from ECC, moved into the territory of alchemy. It was presented in a glass bowl letting off clouds of dry ice smoke, individually packaged in smart little apothecary bottles. This was the Penang Milk Punch, made with pandan-infused Bombay Sapphire East gin (whose product an logo was everywhere), Van Oosten Batavia arrack, Cameron Highland green tea, fresh pineapple juice, fresh lemon juice, clarified milk, Malaysian herb and spice-infused coconut water. Just what the herbalist prescribed, and strangely delicious, too.

Can't wait to see what the Lucky Rice people have in store for us tonight.

Restaurant Gino Lives on in Cupcakeland

The other day I stopped in at the Upper East Side Sprinkles, 780 Lexington Avenue. There, on the north wall of the shop were the famous leaping zebras of the shop's previous tenant, the late, lamented Gino restaurant. Gino was the classic red sauce joint where Gay Talese and Ralph Lauren were regulars, where Woody Allen filmed a scene from Mighty Aphrodite, and where for 65 years generations of Upper East Siders came for their "secret sauce" and spaghetti, osso buco and lasagna.

Actually the original wallpaper was reported to have been taken by Gino co-owner Michael Miele when the restaurant closed in June 2010, to be installed in a successor that never came to life. But it must not have been hard to find a replacement; Scalamandre, the decorative fabric, wallcovering and trim store, still features the wallpaper pattern of leaping zebras (in different colors!) pursued by arrows. The pattern, a nostalgic touchstone for those in the know, was paraded out before a new audience in 2001, when it was featured in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums.

I took in the irony of the situation: Here were the remains of an extinct restaurant exotic, glimpsed at the moment the media was gleefully announcing the demise of its usurper--over-extended cupcake makers. The Wall Street Journal headline: "Forget Gold, the Cupcake Market is Crashing."The helpful Sprinkles server told me that customers still come in and get misty-eyed over the wallpaper, telling her exactly where in the space Gino's phone booth was located, where they always sat, and how much they missed the old place.

Perhaps one day the juice cleanse salon or organic soft serve place that replaces Sprinkles will keep the perpetually airborne zebras aloft and a new generation of customers will wax nostalgic about those great old-fashioned cupcakes they used to get here.

The reports of the cupcake boom's demise may be slightly premature, though: A new branch of Baked by Melissa just opened right across the street from Sprinkles, at 784 Lexington.

Adventures in Fermentation Part II: Shio-koji

Hiroko Shimbo on  shio-koji.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been learning a lot about fermentation, Japanese style. After learning about the healthy properties of miso, I attended a talk by Japanese food expert, chef-instructor, cookbook author and consultant Hiroko Shimbo on the topic of shio-koji, the ingredient Japanese have fallen in love with for its flavor enhancing and tenderizing abilities.

Shio-koji is the miracle marinade, seasoning and tenderizer that’s made from a simple mixture of a substance called koji, sea salt and water It's the enzymes in shio-koji--protease, lipase and amylase—that act as tenderizers.

To understand shio-koji, you first need to understand koji, the mold-innoculated rice integral to making Japan’s favorite fermented grain products: soy sauce, miso, mirin (rice wine vinegar) and saké. Koji plays the key role of breaking down the starch of grains and converting it to glucose, and has been commercially available in Japan since the 14^th century. You can find it at most good Japanese food markets. Even in small doses, koji teams with life; a teaspoon of koji contains about 100 million yeast cells.

Make shio-koji isn’t hard, that is if you don’t mind stirring your batch 100 times a day and letting it develop for five to ten days (it takes longer to ferment in the winter). At the recent International Restaurant and Food Service Show in New York City earlier this month, where she was a featured speaker, Shimbo demonstrated how to do it by mixing together koji  sea salt and water in a ratio of 3:1:5. Check out Shimbo’s shio-koji recipe, for details.  Since New York City has even softer water than Kyoko or Tokyo, she noted, we're lucky to be able to use water straight from the tap.

The possible uses of shio- and shoyu-koji boggle the mind.

If audience members had any doubts that this whole shio-koji thing is for real, Shimbo banished them with a parade of delectable sample dishes made using commercially available shio-koji and shoyu-koji from Marukome (the latter essentially made by substituting soy sauce for the salt and water). While shio-koji is best for fish, chicken and vegetables, shoyu-koji, explained Shimbo, is great with more robust meat or fowl such as pork, beef or chicken.

             

She passed out tender and umami-infused morsels of chicken that had been marinated overnight in shio-koji. Whole chickens should be marinated overnight, but if you’re working with small piece of chicken, a quick 30-minute marinade will do the trick; for white fish, an hour will suffice. Shimbo likes to use three parts shio-koji to one part mirin for her marinade. Since it’s salty, there’s no need for additional seasoning. Shimbo dressed a delicious Brussels sprouts and petit tomatoes salad with a mixture of shio-koji, mustard, rice vinegar, honey, canola oil.

The general rule for marinating, Shimbo instructed, is that the marinade should amount to 10 percent of the total weight of the food you are preparing.

We also tried a salty, thick and creamy tofu-yo, an Okinawan regional specialty that I first tasted at David Bouley’s Brushstroke, in which tofu is marinated in red koji, malt, and a type of local distilled rice alcohol, awamori. Shimbo improvised her version of tofu-yo by keeping it submerged in a  3:1:1 ration of shiokoji, mirin and sake for two weeks. The tofu-yo was the exception to the 10 percent rule, resulting in an umami bomb with the texture of cream cheese and the funky saltiness of blue cheese.

The possible uses of shio-koji boggle the mind: you can use it with olive oil to dress cold pasta, tomato, and red onion, for dipping sauces or in stir frys, Shimbo suggests, or as she did, to tenderize and pump up the flavor of Turkish-style lamb meatballs. Happy experimenting!

Playing House at Fishs Eddy's Vintage Playstation

A set of vintage book plates David owns gave us our color palette.

Yesterday I had the most fun I've had playing with tableware in, well, forever. The occasion grew out of a fun idea from Julie Gaines, who with her husband Dave Lenovitz, owns the Union Square store Fishs Eddy.

Julie, a churning idea factory who needs someone to trail behind her with a pail to collect the overflow, invited a bunch of design people and bloggers, including Todd Oldham, Design Sponge, Susan Brinson and me, to come down to the store, raid its deep stash of vintage tableware (Syracuse, Green Band, Buffalo, Sterling, Jackson, you name it, they've got it) and create a place setting to help inspire customers to mix and match with abandon.

Actually it's not just us, she's invited any and all to try their hand, so I encourage you to make your way down to 19th Street and Broadway soon.

Layering began with a larger charger. We wanted bold colors that would photograph well. 

When Julie and Dave  started out over 25 years ago, the idea of mismatched plates on a table was heresy. Today, it's the matchy-matchy table that looks out of step with how most of us live. Heck, FE is even selling a barrel of unmatched sugar bowl lids and bottoms and showcasing creative ways to use them.

Adding an array of Fishs Eddy's great tchotchkes. 

Anyway, back to the challenge. To vastly increase my table-dressing prowess, I cajoled my good friend David Cobb Craig to join my team. A master of many arts (look at these posts of his to see what I mean), I knew this was right up his alley. Fishs Eddy will be displaying photos of all the Playstation table settings and you can check its blog, Pinterest and Facebook pages for more photos.

Enjoy our table settings!