In Bangalore last week, I ended up at an event at Matsuri, a Japanese restaurant I had never heard of.
Bangalore has good Japanese food because there’s a fairly large community there.
But I had never come across Matsuri. When I got there, I worked out why this was so. Matsuri is at the Chancery on Lavelle Road, a hotel that is run by a division of Toyota. Though the hotel and the restaurant are open to everyone, it is clear that they exist mainly to service the local Japanese community and the many Japanese who visit Bangalore on work.
The menu is pretty much what you would find at an average restaurant in Tokyo (Matsuri does not pretend to be high-end or Kaiseki or whatever) and few concessions are made to the Indian palate. The chef and several of the staff are Japanese and therefore, unfailingly polite. They may well be horrified when guests smear huge dollops of wasabi on their nigiri sushi before bathing the rice in a bowl of soya sauce, but you would never guess that from their expressions.
But, as I watched the Japanese staff and the guests respond to each other at Matsuri, I was reminded of the gulf between what we regard as Japanese food and the food the Japanese actually eat.
By now, most of us have realised that that sushi roll, packed with cooked ingredients and spicy dressing is about as authentically Japanese as American Chop Suey is Chinese. This is not to say that such rolls cannot be tasty. It is just that when Japanese people eat sushi, 95 per cent of the time it is nigiri (usually raw fish mounted on pellets of rice). And that when they do eat rolls, they never eat the kinds that have become popular around the rest of the world. (The big, avocado-filled roll with spicy dressings was invented in America.)
What we don’t always realise however is that even expensive Japanese restaurants outside Japan often do not serve the real thing. I have enormous regard for Nobu Matsuhisa whose influence on world cuisine in the 21st Century is matched only by Ferran Adria’s. But even Nobu will not claim that the food his restaurants serve is authentically Japanese.
Nobu started out by adding Peruvian influences and eventually created an original cuisine of his own that has been copied all over the world. (For Indian examples, think of Wasabi, Megu, Akira Back etc)
One of the senior staff at Matsuri said to me that she thought that Indians only like big flavours. Japanese food, on the other hand, is about subtlety, delicacy and letting the ingredients speak for themselves. Its basic philosophy is the antithesis of Indian cuisine where the interplay of spices is more important than preserving the flavour of the original ingredients.
Will that ever change, the Japanese lady asked me.
My gut reaction was: no. But that may be the wrong answer. Because the more I spoke to her, the more I recalled how much Japanese food had influenced the rest of the world.
So much of what is considered trendy or even ‘normal’ in global dining today is actually Japanese in origin. So perhaps a day will come when a new generation of Indians will appreciate true Japanese cuisine.
As for how Japan has changed the way the world eats, I pulled out my copy of the excellent Rice, Noodle, Fish, by Matt Goulding to find this quote from Anthony Bourdain’s introduction.
“I’ve found that if you sat at a table with eight or nine of the world’s best chefs – from France, Brazil, America, wherever – and you asked them where they would choose if they had to eat in one, and only one, country for the rest of their lives, they would ALL of them pick Japan without hesitation.”
So what are Japan’s contributions? Why do chefs regard it as the world’s finest cuisine? Well, some Japanese influences will strike you as obvious. And you may not have realised that some were actually Japanese in origin.
Instant Noodles
This is one Japanese contribution that most urban Indians are familiar with.
"As long as chefs around the world continue to venerate Japanese food and learn from Japan, all restaurant cuisines will owe a huge debt to Japan."
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It is estimated that last year, an astonishing 100 billion servings of instant noodles were sold all over the world so they may well be Japan’s most important gift to the global food world – far more influential than sushi even. I did a whole piece on the invention of instant noodles and the role of the legendary Momofuku Ando who dreamt them up a few months ago so I won’t devote much more space to them.
If you like, you can find the original Rude Food piece in the web archives.
Tasting Menu
How often have you gone to a fancy restaurant and been encouraged to try the Tasting Menu because it contains all of the chef’s specials? Some great restaurants don’t even bother with a la carte menus. You get a choice of two or three Tasting Menus. And that’s it.
The idea of the set menu is not Japanese. All over France, smaller restaurants will offer you set menus. But these will be advertised as good value three or four course options. (If you ordered each dish on the set menu individually from the a la carte, it would be much more expensive).
The Tasting Menu, however, is rarely less than six or eight courses (it can go up to 20 small courses) and is not supposed to be good value. Its popularity has spread in the last decade and a half as chefs all over the world have tried to copy the Japanese concept of a kaiseki meal. These are menus of many courses and are left entirely to the chef. (The Japanese phrase is ‘omakase’ which roughly translates as “I leave it to the chef.”)
Because Tasting Menus are the mark of Michelin-starred European and American restaurants these days, we don’t realise that they are actually Japanese in origin.
Counter Seating
You may have noticed that more and more restaurants all over the world are breaking with the French tradition where the Chef is the general in charge of his brigade in the kitchen while the manager runs the dining room.
In many modern restaurants, they encourage you to sit at a counter and deal directly with the chef. This is a direct lift from the Japanese Kappo-style where the chef cooks in front of you and serves you the food as it is ready. At its simplest level, the sushi bar operates on this principle. But so do many other more complex Japanese restaurants.
Such French chefs as Joel Robuchon have based whole restaurant concepts (L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon) around a variation of Kappo dining and it is catching on: Peter Gilmore, one of Australia’s best chefs, runs his top-rated Bennelong at the Sydney Opera House on Kappo lines. You will find similar high-end restaurants all over the world.
Raw Food
In the West, they hold up Steak Tartare as an example of their dedication to raw food. The minced raw steak, they say, came from the cuisine of the Tartars. This is nonsense. It’s a 20th Century dish and the Tartare is a reference to the Tartare sauce that used to be served with it. Even Carpaccio was only invented in the 1950s by Harry’s Bar in Venice.
Western chefs only mastered how to serve meat or fish (other than oysters) raw after watching the Japanese make sashimi. And yet every great restaurant will now serve at least some of its dishes raw.
Fish Cookery
And anyway, almost every advance in fish cookery has come from Japan. Most chefs (including the Chinese) used to believe that fish was at its best when it was absolutely fresh. But it’s the Japanese who have taught chefs that a fish tastes better a few days after it is killed and the muscles have relaxed.
They compare the process to the ageing of steak where enzymes convert the water and protein into amino acids over time, improving the taste. A great Japanese sashimi chef is one who knows when each individual fish will taste the best (after three days in the fridge? Four? A week, even?)
And more
I could go on. The recognition of umami as a basic taste may well be Japan’s biggest contribution to our sense of flavour. The use of panko breadcrumbs has revolutionised frying in the West. The current craze for fermentation is Japanese in origin. All chefs treat Japanese knives as the ultimate.
But here’s my point: even when we say that we find real Japanese food too subtle for global tastes, we are ignoring the reality. As long as chefs around the world continue to venerate Japanese food and learn from Japan, all restaurant cuisines will owe a huge debt to Japan.
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