SEARCH

Grilled thornyhead rockfish with sea urchin

This grilled dish uses kinki as an end-of-season winter ingredient. Grilled kinki with sea urchin is a dish meant to let guests enjoy two kinds of…

• Serves 1 · ¥1,600

• Cook time 40 min

Late-season pike conger, matsutake

This is served in place of the simmered dish course. Late-season pike conger, fattened before spawning, pairs superbly with matsutake. Taking the new…

• ¥700

• Cook time 40 min

Tenjin hot pot, softshell turtle, tortoise-shell-cut taro, mushrooms, ginkgo-leaf-cut daikon and carrot, grilled scallion, shiratama dumpling, sprouted scallion

For preparing the soft-shell turtle, the key to cleanly peeling the skin is to pour about 60°C water over it. If the temperature is too high or too…

Shijimi clam Inaniwa udon (mitsuba, julienned ginger, yuzu)

Boiling the udon and then tightening it once in cold water lets you enjoy a beautiful sheen and firm, springy texture. We select only large shijimi…

Tilefish, matsutake mushroom

This is the clear-soup course. The kise-ginkgo — ginkgo nuts coated in a thin kuzu-starch sheet — is set in a hot water bath the same way as kuzukiri…

Rapeseed blossoms and raw sea urchin in sesame tofu dressing, bamboo shoot and sansho-leaf sushi, udo and angelica shoot kinpira

This is course two. The rapeseed blossoms and raw sea urchin with sesame-miso dressing: the sesame tofu is kneaded to a loose consistency, the…

Shellfish and apple namasu; warm-smoked Pacific saury kosode-zushi; sweet potato shaped as chestnuts; burdock deep-fry, aged-wood style; kabocha and beef rolled and simmered; shrimp, crystal-glazed

This is an assembled course of small paired dishes. For the warm-smoked Pacific saury kosode-zushi, a sleeve-shaped pressed sushi, the saury is…

Kuruma Shrimp Hōnen-maki

For the middle course, I wrapped it in a net-patterned spring-roll wrapper made with rice flour, and called it a bountiful-harvest roll. It's eaten…

Bamboo shoot, pen shell, bigfin reef squid, bracken fern, and sansho leaf in sansho-leaf miso dressing

This time, on 'sakizuke,' I learned from chef Matsubara (Roppongi's 'Kasumitei Matsubara'). I take up 'kinome-miso-ae.'

Ginkgo Nut Tofu

Deep-fried swimming crab with a roasted-grain coating, smelt deep-fried in egg-yolk batter

For the swimming crab kōsen-age in the fried course (aburamono), any type of crab will work. I based it on the image of a potato croquette, but in…

Herring and roe pickled together, Naruto-style conger eel nanban-zuke, small sea bream double-fillet grilled, matcha deep-fried lotus root, herb-steamed free-range chicken

The herring oyako-zuke among the appetizers: the herring is first thoroughly bled and rinsed in water to wash off excess fat, then a strong salt cure…

Squid and Egg-Yolk Yawata-maki, Saltleaf Tazuna Potato Sushi

For the appetizer squid and egg-yolk yawata-maki, we roll it up yawata-style, simmer it in egg yolk, and then lightly torch the surface to add a…

Seared bluefin medium fatty tuna cured in miso, threeline grunt blanched and stuffed with myoga, kombu-cured whiting with okra topped with grated mountain yam

This is a sashimi course built around the idea of new ways of serving seafood. Rather than simply serving it as plain sashimi, I've added one or two…

• Serves 1 · ¥1,380

• Cook time 3 hr

Suwa Itokaya Squash and Venison Miso Dengaku

This is the grilled course. Suwa Taisha Shrine issues a chopstick and a talisman called kajiki-men, said to work like an indulgence absolving the…

• ¥800

• Cook time 30 min

Ice Block Presentation

For the palate-refreshing mid-meal course, I made it into an ice-block presentation. This time I laid down bamboo leaves and served sudachi sōmen…

• Serves 1 · ¥980

• Cook time 1 hr

Mantis shrimp cracker soup, sakura shrimp puréed potage, mantis shrimp cracker, and salt-grilled spring sea bream

This is a soup course, an arrangement of the Aomori local dish Hachinohe senbei-jiru. For the mantis shrimp senbei-jiru, based on the senbei-jiru…

• Serves 1 · ¥320

• Cook time 1 hr

Fukushima 'zakuzaku-ni' soup-style, with flower-cut daikon, flower-cut carrot, and chrysanthemum-cut taro

This is a modern arrangement of a local dish. With the wish to pass on the traditional Fukushima local dish zakuzaku-ni into a new era, we thought to…

• Serves 3 · ¥400

• Cook time 1 hr

Splendid alfonsino grilled with shio-koji, layered with plum-blossom sheet sake lees, plum-flavored egg, shrimp-shaped taro in a plum-crest bowl

For the kinmedai grilled with shio-koji, I tried to plate it with a sense of dimension. Marinating and grilling it in Saikyo miso tends to make the…

• ¥750

• Cook time 20 min

Shingoro, Okoge-Style, with Kozuyu Sauce

This is a modern arrangement of the Fukushima local dishes shingoro (a rice cake glazed with egoma, or perilla) and kozuyu (a dish simmered in dried…

• Serves 1 · ¥140

• Cook time 2 hr

Shark Fin Yakuzen Hot Pot with Chicken Dashi

With health-consciousness on the rise, when I thought about what kind of breakfast could draw in customers, I incorporated the concept of medicinal…

• Serves 1 · ¥400

• Cook time 20 min

Brown rice coffee, charred tea snack

Charring is an old technique in Japan; I first learned of it back when I studied macrobiotics. Carbonizing ingredients in a Vermicular oven takes…

• ¥180

• Cook time 5 min

Eel and collagen rice porridge — the synergy of three collagen soups

As part of an effort to cope with rising food costs, the concept behind this meal course is "synergy." When steaming plain-grilled eel, the water in…

• Serves 2 · ¥800

• Cook time 1 hr

Kamo eggplant clear-soup course — golden eye snapper, red shrimp, water shield, sudachi

For the soup course, it's important to time the preparation of each ingredient so that the dish tastes best at the moment the soup ingredients are…