29. A TALE OF TWO COOKING SCHOOLS: PART 2

We had been settled in Osaka for over a week. It was time to meet the other contestant vying for the culinary papacy of Japan, the man hoping to replace Shizuo Tsuji as the leading authority on Japanese cuisine. You’ll remember that in Tokyo I had met Yukio Hattori, famous for inventing the TV cook-off show Iron Chef and head of the Hattori Nutrition College. He had staked his claim with his in-depth knowledge of the health issues involved in Japanese food, his involvement with the Japanese government’s Shokuiku program, and the fact that he had promised to take me to dinner at the best restaurant in Japan.

Now I was to meet his chief rival, Yoshiki Tsuji, the son of Shizuo and, since his father’s death, in 1993, the president of Japan’s largest cooking school, the Osaka-based Tsuji Culinary Institute (TCI), bastion of the Kansai method of cooking.

I had e-mailed the school before we left for Japan and had been surprised to receive a reply from Tsuji himself, inviting me to visit, which is how I found myself waiting in the TCI’s grand conference room, surrounded by French antiques at a vast oval oak table beside a bust of Shizuo Tsuji. I awaited the arrival of his son.

Assistants entered first, offering tea and informing me of Tsuji’s imminent arrival. Soon after, their boss arrived. With a smooth, handsome face and dressed in a sleek gray sports jacket and dark trousers, Yoshiki Tsuji, forty-three, looked like a Japanese Richard Gere. He later told me he was an enthusiastic triathlete, which explained his trim physique and perhaps, too, the sense of coiled, latent energy. He spoke softly, with a minimum of projection, as if used to people hanging on his every word.

We moved into a lounge area, part of his private office, where he explained a little about the school. There were over five thousand students in various buildings here in Osaka, he said, as well as in two châteaus the school owns in southern France—Château de l’Eclair (found for Tsuji senior by his good friend Paul Bocuse) and Château Escoffier—and a smaller school in Tokyo. There was, he said, a roughly equal male/female split among the students, who come mostly from Japan but also from South Korea and Taiwan and are aged from graduate level to over sixty. They are taught Japanese, French, and Italian cooking, as well as patisserie and baking.

I asked if Tsuji-san felt he had taken over his father’s papal role in Japanese cuisine. “No, no, but I do feel extremely responsible,” he said. “We are creating craftsmen here. We do have fewer and fewer students wanting to learn Japanese cuisine because it is so demanding, but we are one of the first schools to realize the danger of this.”

Can he cook himself? “Only breakfast. I have had training since the age of twelve but stopped cooking once I turned eighteen.” His father wrote over thirty books—not just on food but on various other passions, including music, and Yoshiki has so far written two of his own—The Theory of Evolution of Epicurism and An Introduction to the Food Industry. But his business training in the United States has helped him find new ways to develop and expand the school, taking advantage of the economic slowdown in Japan to take over a neighboring bank, for example. The TCI is now a mini-town in its own right, having spread through several neighboring tower blocks in this part of Osaka.

“Would you like to see them?” Tsuji asked. I would, I said, expecting a PR flunky to take me on a brief tour. “Then let’s go,” he said. Tsuji was clearly proud of his school and wanted to show it to me personally. It soon became apparent why. It was not merely the most impressive culinary school I had ever seen—making my alma mater, Le Cordon Bleu, in Paris, look like a provincial primary school in comparison—but one of the most impressive educational establishments one could imagine.

The first room we visited was a state-of-the-art kitchen / TV studio built specially for filming and photography. It bustled with students working beneath arc lights, prepping dishes for the cameras. Next was the main lecture auditorium, twice as large as the one at Hattori’s school, Tsuji pointed out, with highly polished mahogany writing desks and a gigantic stainless steel workstation decorated with twelve copper pots hanging from the front, each sparkling beneath spotlights. It was designed by John Morford, the man behind the Park Hyatt hotel in Tokyo (the Lost in Translation hotel), and, as with the rest of the school, it was clear that no expense had been spared on materials. Throughout, the decor was elegant and expensive, like a posh health spa, with gray slate and sophisticated beige, and wherever we went, all the students were in crisp white uniforms with blue aprons and gray trousers. The chefs, meanwhile, wore single-breasted white jackets, ties, and tall toques.

All of the 490 teaching staff are Japanese, Tsuji explained, and most of them are specialists, including one who has spent over thirty years perfecting the art of the tamago, or Japanese rolled omelet. “We have the highest quality of teaching. There is huge competition to become a teacher here, and many can’t keep up with the standard once they come.” I had heard various stories about the brutality of Japanese chefs. How did they prepare students for the punishing regime of working in a real kitchen? “The teachers aren’t allowed to hit with their hands or with utensils or use psychological bullying, but within those limits, they are extremely tough. They have to be,” said Tsuji.

Students pay upward of $25,000 a year to attend. “It is the most expensive cooking school in the world,” he told me proudly. “Even though Dorothy Cann Hamilton still insists that is the International Culinary Center in New York. I argue a little with her about that!” (Tsuji now has a foot in New York himself as the co-owner, with David Bouley, of a double-Michelin-starred Japanese restaurant, called Brushstroke, in Tribeca.)

There was an entire building dedicated to French and Italian cooking, as well as another for advanced patisserie. In the administration block, Tsuji pointed out the offices of the school psychologists, employed to help students assimilate into school life and solve personal problems, something they consider extremely important.

We sat in on a demonstration in a large, sparklingly clean kitchen. The chef was running through a sun-themed menu, showing students how to tackle an entire sack of salmon roe, followed by a salmon fillet dish in soy and yuzu. The chef pin-boned the salmon, deftly sliding the bones between his index and middle finger as he went, like an expert seamstress. Then he marinated some salmon strips in soy, mirin, onion, and vinegar together with a little dried chili. The students sat in attentive silence.

In Europe and America, the restaurant industry still relies on apprenticeships whereby keen youngsters work, often for nothing, in professional kitchens, starting on the lowest tier. The system is often abused to the extent that you might as well call it slavery, but in Japan, things are even more extreme. “It used to be that young chefs would literally have to sit outside in front of the restaurant they wanted to work in for a week, hoping to be allowed to join the kitchen—I am talking about the really famous restaurants—but that system has pretty much collapsed now. We don’t have the culture of stages in Japan. We do have apprenticeships, which start at sixteen; instead of getting paid, they get accommodations, food, and travel costs, but that is also declining now.”

In contrast, TCI graduates are eagerly sought by the top restaurants in the country—fifteen thousand restaurants send requests to the school for one of their three thousand graduates each year, Tsuji claimed.

When the demo was finished, he invited me to lunch. I followed him to one of the canteens, whose kitchen is run entirely by the students. At Le Cordon Bleu, we would watch the chef demonstrate three courses, then adjourn to the practical kitchens to make the main course. Here, though, students were making ten courses for a dining room that would soon be filled by fifty or so very picky guests.

We were early, so Tsuji invited me to spend some time watching in the kitchen. I was astounded by the students’ skill and organization and the complexity of the dishes they were preparing. In one corner, one male and one female student were putting the finishing touches on some exemplary sashimi plates; elsewhere, another was deep-frying somen noodles to use as decoration for—and to add bite to—tempura batter.

The meal was superb—elegant, colorful, fresh, and inventive; I would have been hard-pressed to distinguish it from a meal in a good local restaurant. We sat with some students. I asked one—with Tsuji translating—why he had come to the school: “Because I love Japan and want to learn about Japanese culture” was his Miss World–ish reply. “Japanese cuisine is the coolest and most beautiful in the world,” said another.

Over lunch, I mentioned that I was looking forward to eating in one of Osaka’s best restaurants, Kahala, that evening.

“Oh yes. It’s wonderful,” said Tsuji. “How did you find out about it? Who are you going with?”

“Kadokami-san [Takeshi Kadokami, one of Kansai’s leading food writers, whom I had met the previous day] recommended it. I am going alone. He says it’s not really a place to take kids.”

Tsuji looked pained. “You’re going alone, but … no, no, we can’t have that.” He reached inside his jacket and took out his diary. “Let me see, well, would you mind if I accompanied you?”

“That would be great, yes, but I doubt you could get a table now, could you?” (The restaurant seats only eight and is booked up weeks in advance.)

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” said Tsuji, beckoning a minion and speaking to him in Japanese.

A few moments later, the assistant returned and nodded once to indicate that it was all taken care of.

So that evening Tsuji and I met at Kahala, the celebrated kappo (“counter” restaurant) run by Yoshifumi Mori, a short, stout, gray-haired chef in his early sixties.

Tsuji-san told me that Mori-san had run this chic, low-lit restaurant in the Kita Shinchi nightlife district of Osaka for thirty-five years. He is self-taught, and his often wildly imaginative cooking blends the most exquisite Japanese seasonal produce with French and contemporary molecular techniques. Some have called him Japan’s Ferran Adrià, which seemed appropriate as far as our first “dish,” a sparkling sake with wasabi, was concerned. His signature beef mille-feuille followed—five ultrathin, exceptionally tender layers of beef briefly seared on the hot plate in front of us by Mori-san—along with a glutinous shark’s fin with matsutake mushroom, and hamo served with gigantic mustard seeds on a bed of soft konbu.

There were over ten courses in all, and I later discovered that the meal must have run to over ¥100,000 ($800) with the serious bottle of vintage Bordeaux that Tsuji ordered to go with it. He insisted on paying and had in fact done so before I even realized the bill had been presented, but that was not the end of his hospitality.

“Do you have time for a drink perhaps?” he asked as we left.

A couple of doors farther down the street, he turned, smiled, and led me into a basement entrance, his members-only club, he explained. We were met by a heavily made-up middle-aged woman in a glamorous frock and shown through to a long, narrow, brightly lit, windowless lounge.

My first thought—and this is honestly true—was Ah, isn’t it nice that all these men have brought their wives out for the evening. It was only when one of the “wives” slunk over to our table and proceeded to sit next to me, so close that our thighs met, that reality dawned.

Before we had even sat down, Tsuji’s personal bottle of single-malt whiskey had been retrieved from the club’s storage and was waiting at our table. He poured glasses for me and the two women who had by now joined us. They were good friends, he said. “I often come here when I am alone in Osaka. My family lives in Tokyo, you see. They really are friends of mine. Sometimes I’ll take one of them out to lunch or something.”

I smiled at the girls, not a little bashfully. The idea of paying for female company, even platonic, has always seemed self-defeating to me. If you are paying someone for his or her company, then that person’s interest in you is not far off that of the dogs in the Bow Wow café. But within seconds, I had completely fallen for the hostesses’ charms. I was putty in their hands.

They were exceedingly good at their job and spoke a charming, broken English, and all too soon, I grew utterly convinced that they genuinely were interested in me, that I had somehow seduced them: they were that good—no matter that one looked like a young, Japanese Ava Gardner and the other had Renée Zellweger dimples, while I am heading rapidly into Homer Simpson territory.

As the evening wore on, the conversation became more personal. I asked Tsuji where he had learned his impeccable English. His father had sent him at the age of twelve to Fettes Prep School, Tony Blair’s alma mater. That must have been tough. “Well, put it this way: I was the only Asian boy at boarding school.” It struck me as curious that a man with such a finely honed sensitivity to food as Shizuo Tsuji would send his son to live in Scotland. “I tell you,” said Tsuji, laughing, “it took ten years for my palate to recover!”

I mentioned that I had discussed Tsuji’s and Hattori’s rivalries with chef Murata in Kyoto. When I’d asked Murata about Tsuji, he had sniffed. “Tsuji flies first-class between Japan and Europe, and stays at the Ritz.” I mentioned this to Tsuji. Curiously, he took issue with Murata’s choice of hotel. “Pfft. I would never stay at the Ritz,” Tsuji said, affronted. “I always stay at the George V!”