A Non-Traditionalist Japanese Chef does New Year's

Tojo's Great Pacific Roll

 Blog posts have a life of their own. You write them, forget about them, and then a day, week, a year later, there's a response. The process can be like sending out a message in a bottle, having it circumnavigate the globe and return to your shore with an answer.  Last New Year,  I  blogged about this article on Japanese osechi ryori,  which I wrote for Edible Manhattan.

I happened to be in Vancouver at the time, so I wondered where I might be able to find osechi in that Pacific city, home to lots of Japanese ex-pats and with great access to both freshly caught seafood and Japanese ingredients.

Then just recently, my bottle returned when I received this comment from Hopstepka, who I assume is a Vancouver blogger: "Just found your query. The best osechi ryori we've found is sold by Seto Sushi in Richmond. After that, there's Fujiya."

Thanks, Hopstepka! Seto's menu includes the delicious-sounding matsutake dobin mushi (translated as mushroom tea pot soup with seasonal pine mushroom) and an intriguing BBQ tako cake (BBQ octopus fish cake).

I got to wondering what my favorite sushi chef in Vancouver, Hidekazu Tojo, does to ring in the New Year at his eponymous West Broadway restaurant. Although he trained in a traditional Osaka ryotei, or high-end Japanese restaurant, Tojo says "I never really liked osechi. Everything is too salty, because the idea was that you put the food in a box that would last three or four days so you wouldn't have to cook during the holiday.

More of Tojo's sushi, fresh, fresh, fresh.

"Today, young people don't like overly salty cooking, and the people who come here are very health-oriented, they don't like foods that are to sweet, salty, or deep-fried. So I cook 'new traditional food.'"

For New Year's Tojo makes his usual omakase, or chef's choice menu, a series of small plates that progress from a sunomono, or vinegared vegetables, on to various steamed, fried and seared dishes as well as raw fish and sushi plates. He includes "new wave rolls" like his Pacific Northwest Roll of dungeness crab, avocado, scallop and fish roe, or his Northern Light Roll of wild prawn tempura, avocado and seasonal fruit rolled in a cucumber crepe.

During New Year's week, the chef will highlight traditional Japanese foods, where he updates osechi ingredients such as lotus root and black bean. He might lightly saute the lotus, and simmer the black beans in a less sugary-sweet syrup than the traditional style.

From the omakase menu, BC salmon with Asian vegetables, western-style sauce.

Referring to the somewhat westernized sauces and preparations that have crept into his food over 40 years in Vancouver, Tojo adds, "Even in Japan now, European, Chinese, Japanese food, all of it's mixed." In Canada, he believes, "The best way is to little by little introduce traditional Japanese foods."

Some osechi traditions die hard, though. Even an avowed healthy modernist like Tojo adheres to some of the symbolism that is an essential part of osechi. The colors red and white, he notes, are most important, symbolizing respect for ancestors, good health, and purity. They'll be represented on his plates in the form of the traditional kohaku namasu, a red and white vinegared daikon and carrot salad.  He'll also serve red shrimp, and a little bit of white dried fish.

So the traditional New Year's feast will be present at Tojo's, but in small bits and bites, slipped in between plates of some of the most pristine raw fish preparations you'll find on the West Coast.

Sounds great. The only problem: I won't be in Vancouver for this year's celebration.

Montreal vs. Paris: Advantage Pucks and Poutine

The great thing about Montreal is that it's so close and so French. I would call it a poor woman's Paris, but that would be doing the quirky Quebec city a disservice. It's only so in the sense that you can get there for less money than you would by jetting to Charles de Gaulle.

There  are so many only-in-Quebec things that make Montreal sui generis. Like poutine. This great ambassador of the category (below) was jumping with juicy bay scallops and shrimp, a real find on the menu of The Montrealais at the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth.

Or the Montreal Canadiens, whose glory days may live in memory only, but aren't ones to wallow in self-pity, as the team's unsentimental locker room motto indicates. (A good credo for life in general, don't you think?) Even during a dismal lock-out year, you can pay a visit to the Habs' Temple de la Renomee (a much more accurate and evocative name than the pallid English translation, "Hall of Fame") at Centre Bell.

And where in Paris would you find a cheese shop called by the Franco-British name La Maison du Cheddar, filled with an assortment of artisanal Quebec cheeses?

Nor could you locate this in Paris: My favorite Montreal restaurant find, Van Horne, a fine art-filled pocket place where chef Eloi Dion oversees a kitchen staff of one other person and tuns out (at very reasonable prices) precise, detailed dishes like this compressed watermelon salad with fines herbes-infused tomato, marinated shallots, olive, capers, house-made ricotta and tomato chips.  

Finally, I love that delicious and chewy St-Viateur bagels are sold at the airport, so that you can take a bag home like the parting gift from an over-generous host. I didn't even make it to the smoked meat category, but that's for another post. 

Have Refrigerated Meat, Will Travel: In Wake of Hurricane Sandy, Jake Dickson Wanders the Upper East Side

Inside his roving truck, Dickson and his meat remain chill, despite the disaster.

It's been surreal, sitting out Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath of death, destruction and displacement from the leafy confines of the Upper East Side. Just a few miles away, homeless people are wading through sewage or picking through rubble trying to salvage a few mementos, while up here, irate commuters stuck in traffic or waiting for the reduced-schedule Madison Avenue bus is about as bad as it gets. An incident early yesterday morning, though, brought the disaster closer to home.

On my power walk to the gym, I spotted a familiar face smiling at me on the corner of 84th and Lex. I waved and said hello, and a split-second later, put together face with name. It took a moment because the bearded visage was totally out of geographical context. What was downtown artisanal butcher, Jake Dickson, the guy behind Dickson's Farmstand Meats, doing on the Upper East Side, drinking coffee and loitering on a corner with his wife Jen and fluffy white Italian Spinone, Olive?

Of course, I realized, the Chelsea Market vendor must be among the tens of thousands of displaced downtowners, like the Greenwich Village friend who arrived yesterday afternoon to camp out in my apartment.

I'd be the first in line to buy if only some of these slabs were carved.

In Dickson's case, though, much more than a carton of spoiled milk is at stake. In preparation for Thanksgiving, he purchased a record seven-and-a-half animals, and says that when the power went out at his popular meat and sandwich shop he had to do triage. "We've had to prioritize, and sadly, abandon about 2,700 pounds of boneless beef, pork and lamb," he told me, about $15,000 worth of hanging carcass. To add to his losses, his car is likely totaled from the water damage it sustained.

 Leaving behind cheaper cuts like chuck, bottom round and trim, he packed up all of the cuts he dry ages, such as beef and pork loins and beef ribs. He salvaged his most valuable ribeyes andNew York strips as well as the "value-added" products he makes such as his bacon and pancetta. The latter take anywhere from three to five weeks to cure and represent thousands of hours of labor. The downside to a refrigerated truck full of valuable fresh and cured meat? "I'm staying with my in-laws and running the truck every few hours to keep it cold," says Dickson.

Roaming the streets of the UES all day and night looking for a new parking space is not Dickson's biggest problem though. Even more pressing is the need to reopen as soon as possible, since another round of already-slaughtered animals is hanging upstate, waiting for that empty refrigerated truck to come and pick it up. Since he only works with small local farmers, the orders for those animals were placed weeks ago, and time delays risk further losses and unhappy customers.

And as with every business shut down by the super-storm, the ripple effect can be measured in human livelihoods. "I have seventeen employees dying to get back to work," says Dickson. "Neither of our stores (he also runs a recently opened shop at the TriBeCa haute Food Hall All Good Things on Church Street) sustained any physical damage. We've cleaned up and can be ready to open within three hours of power coming back on."

Until then, you might see a white truck bearing black letters reading "Dickson's Farmstand Meats" inching along in post-hurricane gridlock. You'll know it's Jake Dickson, keeping his product chilled until the lights come on again downtown. 

Bringing New Life to Japanese American Hero Gordon Hirabayashi's Story

Three men, Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasui, defied President Franklin Roosevelt's order to 110,000 West Coast Japanese to submit to evacuation and imprisonment during World War II. Among their stories, Gordon Hirabayashi's has always struck me as the most dramatic.

Convinced that Executive Order 9066 was unconstitutional, he possessed the moral courage to defy it. He ignored a curfew placed on targeted Japanese, refused to post bail that would have sent him to a prison camp, and challenged the government on the constitutionality of the Order. Upon conviction, lacking the funds to get himself from Seattle, where he had been at senior at the University of Washington, he hitchhiked to Tuscon, where he was to serve out his sentence, sleeping in ditches along the way.

Forty-three years later, Hirabayashi's conviction (upheld by the Supreme Court in 1943) was overturned by a San Francisco federal appeals court. Earlier this year, President Obama posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

So I was excited to hear that actor and playwright Jeanne Sakata's play about Hirabayashi, Hold These Truths, was coming to New York's Epic Theater. Last night Sakata spoke at a meeting of JAJA (an informal group of Japanese Americans and Japanese living in New York) at the Manhattan loft of Tamio Spiegel and Julie Azuma.

It was fascinating to hear the story of how Sakata's initial curiosity about Hirabayashi turned into a driving passion, inspiring her to try her hand at play writing for the first time. She forged a relationship with Hirabayashi, and immersed herself in his correspondence and papers at the University of Washington library. She lucked out, meeting Hirabashi when he was in his early 80s, his memory sharp and his naturally sunny personality on full display. Hirabayashi died in January after suffering from Alzheimer's disease for a number of years, at 93.

Hirabayashi's personality was so positive in fact, that pinpointing those moment of self-doubt and anguish that Sakata  knew she needed to give her one-man play dramatic tension proved to be one of the challenges of the project. Even though Hirabayashi gave her licence to "just make up" what she lacked, she preferred not to; luckily she came across enough early primary source material to illuminate those desperate moments. One  such discovery came when she learned that when Hirabayashi's parents were brought from their prison camp to Seattle to testify against him, the government refused to put them up in decent lodgings, instead making them stay in his prison cell with him. Hirabayashi swore he would never forgive the U.S. government for doing that to his parents. He was also, Sakata told the audience, deeply anguished over the pain he caused his mother by his actions, which she feared would separate him from the family forever. 

Asked how she felt about a non-Japanese, playing the role of Hirabayashi (Filipino American Joel de la Fuente stars), Sakata noted that the theaters at which Hold These Truths has been staged all conduct open auditions, and that all the leading Japanese American male actors who might have fit the part were busy working, which for any actor is  "a good thing."

From all reports this latest incarnation of the play is moving, beautifully acted and powerful theater; I'm looking forward to seeing it.

Hold These Truths

By Jeanne Sakata

Starring Joel de la Fuente

Epic Theater

344 E. 14th St.

New York, NY 1009

Through November 18

Ishikawa Prefecture Drops in on NYC

Here are a few photos from a beautifully cooked and presented dinner I attended last night at Gramercy Tavern in celebration of one of Japan's most culturally rich areas, Ishikawa Prefecture. Hosts Michael Romano, president of culinary development for Union Square Hospitality Group and  GT executive chef  Michael Anthony presided over the event, held in a private room decked out to the nines by USHG's talented in-house floral designer Roberta Bendavid.

Before guests arrive,  ChefAnthony decides to preserve the moment.

Paying homage to the foods of Ishikawa, which is located on the more picturesque side of the country, the Sea of Japan coast, nine courses showcased oysters, lobster, crab and kinmedai (golden sea bream) among other delicacies. We sat down to a first course of sea urchin, creamy Hakurei turnips and apples dressed in miso and pumpkin seeds. A teepee-like wooden construction stood over each dish, an allusion to the yukitsuri rope coverings used to protect wintering trees in Japan, and in Ishikawa's Kenrokuen park.

Two of Ishikawa most famous exports (besides Chairman Kaga of Iron Chef  fame) are Kutani ceramics and Wajima lacquerware, both of which were represented at the table. I was so taken with this Wajimaware bowl, but the matsutake mushroom and crab soup inside it was equally refined. Chefs Romano and Anthony were assisted by a surprise guest, chef Shinichiro Takagi of Zeniya restaurant in Kanazawa, the capital of Ishikawa Prefecture. (Orchestrating the dinner behind the scenes was Gohan Society founder and Korin Japanese Trading Corp. President Saori Kawano.) Later, Anthony noted that the one word he took away from the kitchen lessons of the evening was "restraint;" this clear soup exemplified that value.

Romano, who has been given the honorary title of "Ambassador of Culture and Fine Dining" by the governor of Ishikawa Prefecture, enthusiastically discussed his Ishikawa culinary finds, especially koji, the mold-innoculated rice that is enjoying its moment in Japan, especially mixed with salt to form a kind of super-seasoning, and ishiri, an Ishikawa-made super-powered fish sauce containing pickled and fermented squid intestines. In what must have been catnip to the roomful of chefs, Romano evoked those moments "when you just need a little something to round out a dish, fill in the middle." A squirt of ishiri, he marveled, "fills up a whole flavor spectrum on your palate." 

Kitchen Assistant Confidential

As promised, a little about the chefs who were invited to Cakebread Cellars' American Harvest Workshop in Napa. Not only were they a fun-loving bunch of guys, they were key players in arguably the highlight of the event, two amazing dinners that showcased both their talents and the products of selected purveyors.

Included were David Hawskworth, who made a name for himself at Vancouver's West restaurant before launching his eponymous Hawskworth (it was the talk of the town last time I was in Vancouver) in the Rosewood Hotel Georgia; Cuban-born chef Louis Pous, who headed The Dining Room at Little Palm Island in the Florida Keys before being tapped to become chef for the resort's parent company, Noble House; Daniel Stern, who heads his own restaurant group in Philadelphia, including showpiece R2L; Louisiana-born Danny Trace, who cut his teeth at Commander's Palace in New Orleans and now heads the kitchen at Brennan's of Houston, and Will Bradof and Paul Wireman of Trio in Jackson, Wyoming.

For the two dinners, each chef drew an ingredient that he (yes, it was an all-male group, though there have been women chefs invited to previous workshops) had to cook with, typically one provided by one of the 18 purveyors. Not only did each have to build his dishes around the designated ingredient, he had to try to incorporate as many other purveyor ingredients as possible.

It wasn't exactly a hardship, what with the likes of Broken Arrow Ranch, which harvests wild antelope, Napa Valley Lamb Company, The Hog Island Oyster Company, Sonoma County Poultry (home to the excellent Liberty Ducks), Sparrow Lane vinegars, and Devil's Gulch Ranch for rabbit.

Below is a menu-planning session with the six chefs, led by Brian Streeter, Cakebread Cellars' culinary director and American Harvest Workshop manager.

It was probably not easy for the chefs at first, not knowing each other and having to riff out loud on ingredients as they conceptualized their dishes, but they gradually warmed to the task. A good-natured Pous changed course on his quail dish, incorporating  a plantain mofongo (smashed with bacon and garlic, Puerto Rican style) that the rest of the group cajoled out of him. Stern described an antelope loin preparation wrapped in Fatted Calf lardo with a fried green tomato salad dressed with walnut champagne vinegar (as mouth-watering in reality as it sounded at the meeting). Trace decided on a king salmon caviar club with avocado squash and Bellwether Farms creme fraiche. As each came up with his dish, Michael Weiss, professor of wine and spirits at the Culinary Institute of America, suggested Cakebread vintages and varietals that would pair best with them.

One of the best parts for the non-chefs was getting to cook in the kitchen with the professionals. I assisted Trace and sliced the avocado squash on a Japanese benriner mandoline, washed arugula, chopped tiny cherry tomatoes and peppers and most painstakingly of all, helped placed micro-green garnishes on the tomatoes. We really could have used tweezers, but thankfully it wasn't that kind of kitchen.

Cakebread President Bruce Cakebread, in blue shirt, flashing his knife skills. 

Danny Trace assembling his salmon caviar club sandwiches.
My handiwork, sliced avocado squash, forms the base. 

In process: David Hawksworth's albacore tataki with
smoked jalapeno and corn vinaigrette. 

Things I learned from my time in the kitchen: that plating a dish like the one above requires the eye of an abstract artist; that six chefs can really produce a lot of dirty pots and pans and it helps to have cheerful dishwashers; that sheep's milk ice cream really does taste wonderful (that is when made with Bellwether Farms product and paired, as Trace expertly did, with Gourmet Mushrooms bread pudding, Marshall's Farm honey and a red-wine beurre rouge), and that it's more fun to be in the kitchen with the cooks than with the wine-and-hors d'oeuvres crowd on the patio

Hokkaido's Star Turn at Mitsuwa Marketplace

I managed to sneak away to Edgewater, NJ, today to catch my first Mitsuwa Marketplace fair. Hokkaido-Ten opened  this morning and runs through Sunday, and it's unbelievably fun for anyone who loves looking at and tasting new and interesting foods. If you've ever been to the Japanese depachika, the gargantuan food-stuffed basement wonders where regional festivals or celebrations of seasonal delicacies abound, this will feel reassuringly familiar. 

Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, is famous for its beautiful scenery and seafood. So of course there was tons of it the latter, as well as many varieties of kamaboko (fish cakes), spicy things, unusual confections, and melon soft ice cream. 

These are slippery seafood and shellfish preparations, including combinations
 of herring roe and rapeseed plant, and engawa (a part of the scallop) and wasabi.

Loads of dried mackerel of all kinds, and in the center, a Hokkaido specialty,
horsehair crab.

An abundance of king crab, a lot of it over sushi rice. Here, sea urchin,
delicately shredded king crab and some superior salmon roe.

Pollock , cod, and salmon roe, any level of spiciness you want!

The fair is pretty kabocha-crazy, too, which made me happy.  These cakes are made from a mix of pumpkin and rice flour, so they are chewy like mochi. All were delicious but I was partial to the one on the left, flecked with black sesame and filled with a kabocha custard and bits of the steamed pumpkin itself.

More kabocha: a traditional red bean manju confection is steamed, enrobed in pumpkin paste, and then wrapped again in pie pastry shaped to resemble a kabocha pumpkin. Happy Fall!