I FELL in love with Japan when I was 13. Banished from the living room because my parents were entertaining, I flopped down in my sister's bedroom and watched Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" on PBS; within minutes I was smitten. I renounced the platform bed in which I'd slept for the previous five years, replacing it with a futon. I started cooking when I came across Shizuo Tsuji's superb "Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art" (Kodansha International) in a bookstore. I found in Mr. Tsuji's elegant presentation a real-world articulation of the aesthetic and ideological purity that I had perceived as the essence of the Kurosawa film; if Kurosawa had ignited my love for the country, Mr. Tsuji deepened and defined it.
A platter of seafood, vegetables and tongue at Kitcho in Kyoto.
The image of the country that lingered with me was, I think, a common one among Westerners - an idealized feudal Japan, with teahouses and temples, castles and bamboo forests, sliding rice paper screens and raked gravel gardens. I was aware that this was a romantic notion; when I finally made it to Tokyo, with its neon and concrete, its clangor and rush, my response was not one of disappointment but of exhilaration. Looking out over the vast city from the 52nd floor of the Park Hyatt Hotel, the movie reference was not "The Seven Samurai" but the information-dense, electric megalopolis of Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner."
All Japan - pretty much all the world, really - is a struggle between past and future. If in Tokyo the future is dominant, in Kyoto, the past is robust and vibrant. Kyoto's cuisine (kyo-ryori) is the legacy of court and temple, aristocratic and understated; unusual locations and exquisite food made the meals I ate there some of the most magical of my life, and made the traditional Japan I'd first fallen in love with palpable.
IN A TEMPLE
Tenryu-ji, in the hills west of Kyoto, is the city's most important Zen temple, famous for its 14th-century garden. On rainy days, mist pours down from the mountains, spilling over the crests of the forested hills, slipping towards the temple's jade green lake. Diners eat in an elegant pale wood hall, the space divided into long rooms by sliding partitions. They sit (or, if they have the knees for it, kneel) side by side along a brilliant crimson runner, facing a view over temples and the valley beyond.
Served on bright red lacquer plates, each of the six or seven dishes is beautifully presented and seasonal; it is also, in the tradition of shojin-ryori (Buddhist temple food), strictly vegetarian, and remarkably good. There was delicate sesame tofu, braised mountain potato and an extraordinary gratin of eggplant with sweet white miso. Kyoto is known for its simmered tofu dishes; here, the chefs played the texture of doughy fu (wheat gluten) off more elastic yuba (a sheetlike form of tofu, sometimes called "tofu skins"), served in a seaweed nage brightened with a little lime, with matsutake mushroom and sugar snap peas. For the committed carnivore, this is meatlessness without privation. The set lunches are served from 11 to 2 daily, and cost from $31.85, at about 110 yen to the dollar, to $68.25.
IN A TRADITIONAL INN
The flagstones at the entrance to Hiiragiya Ryokan, an inn that is almost 200 years old, are always kept wet, honoring an ancient tradition of hospitality. Inside, the halls are quiet and dark, the kimono-clad staff slipping by in silence. The rooms, elegant spaces of tatami and sliding screens, are austere and handsome. Every room has a tokonoma, an alcove holding a flower arrangement and an antique scroll, carefully chosen to remind the viewer of the season, and, more quietly, of where he or she exists in time and space. After a day spent exploring the city, the inn is a tranquil haven. I ate dinner in my room, which opened onto a small garden of moss and maples and stones, glossy and black from water spilling from a small decorative spring.
The evening meal at Hiiragiya is a banquet form of kaiseki, the elaborate, multicourse dinner traditionally enjoyed after the tea ceremony. The meal was a choreographed procession that began with an aperitif of sake infused with sweet plum, then moved through the prescribed series of exquisite appetizers, sashimi, simmered dishes, grilled dishes, steamed dishes, fried dishes and vinegar dishes, and ending with soup, pickles and rice. Everything every dish was excellent, but standouts included creamy sesame tofu with sweet sea urchin and broad beans; pumpkin and taro simmered with octopus and white beans, and rolls of beef around burdock and asparagus, grilled and garnished with pine nuts. A dessert of mango jelly with banana and beautiful strawberries was followed with frothy green tea and the inn’s specialty, wagashi a small dumpling filled with sweet bean paste. Dinner is served at 7 p.m., although guests may request a slightly earlier or later time. Rooms with kaiseki dinner and Japanese or Western breakfast range between $319 and $728 a person a night, depending on room size and season.
BY A RIVER AT THE FOOT OF A MOUNTAIN
Since I was visiting Kyoto in spring, my friend Shigeru Tokuriki wanted me to see the bright greens of the trees and plants in the fields and hills that ring the city. He took me to dinner at Arashiyama Kitcho, by the Ooi River, not far from Tenryu-ji.
As we pulled into the parking lot, a procession paraded past our car: two waiters bearing silver ice buckets filled with bottles of champagne were followed by a maharajah and his retinue. This is Kitcho in a nutshell - exclusive, refined, and exotic, almost something dreamed rather than lived. The chef, Kunio Tokuoka, is one of the country's most famous, his restaurant a magnet for visiting European and American chefs and politicians, as well as, apparently, the occasional maharajah.
Mr. Tokuoka's success lies in the way he nimbly blends tradition and innovation, as well as the emphasis he places on the luxurious setting and immaculate service. The restaurant is designed so that, parking-lot encounters aside, you don't see any other diners during your meal. Patrons eat at low tables in tatami rooms, looking out onto the gardens. I watched a gardener put up small bundles of irises, then just coming into bloom, onto a rack with candles in celebration of the season; the aperitif offered with the kaiseki meal - the elaborate, multicourse dinner traditionally enjoyed after the tea ceremony - was sake with shaved iris root.
Every plate was beautiful, presented on a black lacquer tray on a gleaming black lacquer table. And literally, the plates themselves were beautiful: Mr. Tokuoka serves some of his food on 400-year-old ceramics. The menu proceeds along the kaiseki path, but many of the dishes have subtly modern, often international, touches. For example, he offers tofu with sea urchin, but serves it with a modish wasabi jelly. A slab of toro sashimi (fatty tuna), pink and meaty as prime beef, comes garnished with chips of toasted garlic. A small beef dish - braised tongue with mashed mountain potato - formed part of a tableau assembled under a bough of wisteria, with a plate of scallops with asparagus sauce, and a small bowl of fried river fish, the tray lighted by tea candles hidden inside lanterns made from furled sheets of hand cut daikon radish. Like everything Mr. Tokuoka puts his hand to, the platter was beautiful, thoughtful and delicious. Lunch and dinner are served daily except Wednesday. Meals range from $335 to $545, and reservations well in advance are recommended.
IN A TEAHOUSE RESTAURANT
While Kitcho is modern, Hyotei is ancient. For more than 300 years, the restaurant, a cluster of teahouses arrayed around a pond and a small brook, has fed pilgrims coming to the nearby Nanzen-ji. The roof of the main building is covered in thatch several feet thick, and every surface of each tea house and dining room - the wooden beams, the tatami mats, the sliding screens - has the lovely patina of something old and cherished.
I was traveling with an American chef, and we were invited to Hyotei by Yoshi Tsuji, whose father wrote the book that had been my introduction to Japanese cooking. Yoshi Tsuji runs several cooking schools in Japan and in Europe; Kazuki Kondo, dean of the Osaka school, joined us for dinner. Both men are obsessed with the preservation of authentic Japanese cooking; over a classic kaiseki meal, they worried that young Japanese no longer want to train in the traditional styles, preferring instead more casual Italian and French cooking.
A meal at Hyotei is a truly timeless experience; the cuisine has hardly changed in a century, or even two centuries. The meal began with an astoundingly good sashimi of sea bream; a later dish presented poached bream roe with soft tofu and peas. Many ingredients were intriguingly unfamiliar - sea urchin was served on an okra mousse in a broth with junsai, a form of freshwater weed with a dark green, branching, threadlike core encased in a gelatinous coat, the herbal plant popping pleasantly with each bite. Some courses involved presentations of several dishes - soft-boiled eggs with buttery golden yolks, crumbed flounder filets, a pair of mantis shrimp, and rounds of cucumber with tiny, pumpkin-shaped berries. Sushi of halibut and shrimp, rolled and trussed with a banana leaf into a horn shape preceded the meal's highlight: small fillets of sea bass, grilled with nothing but salt, topped with a chiffonade of shiso; with ingredients of such high quality, any other preparation would have seemed almost vulgar. Days and hours vary seasonally, and reservations should be made well in advance. Kaiseki costs from $198 for lunch and from $220 for dinner.
I asked the two chefs to sign my copy of "Japanese Cooking" Mr. Tsuji wrote an eloquent dedication in English, while Mr. Kondo chose a Japanese expression: "ichigo ichie."
The phrase gets to the very heart of the tea ceremony - it means "just this one meeting, once in a lifetime," urging that every encounter should be valued as if it were to be the last. It's an intensely Japanese notion, binding the ephemeral quality of experience to an enduring tradition of hospitality.
After dinner, we sat for a while in the tea house, and listened to the stream, happy together, the meal and the company perfect at every level. In the moonlight, the stream was black flecked with silver. In the air, the sound of bullfrogs and distant peacocks.
Restaurant Information
Hiiragiya Ryokan, Oike-kado, Fuyacho, Nakagyo-ku, (81-75) 221-1136; http://www.hiiragiya.co.jp/.
Hyotei, 35 Kusakawa-cho, Nanzen-ji, (81-75) 771-4116; http://www.hyotei.co.jp/.
Kitcho, 58 Susukinobaba, Tenryu-ji, Saga, Ukyo-ku, (81-75) 881-1101; www.kitcho.com/kyoto/english.
Tenryu-ji Shigetsu, inside Tenryu-ji, Arashiyama, 75-882-9725.
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