36. THE RESTAURANT AT THE END OF MY UNIVERSE

We flew from Okinawa back north to Tokyo the next day just in time for my dinner date with destiny at Mibu, the restaurant Yukio Hattori had said was the best in Japan.

Mibu, you’ll recall, was the place that made Joël Robuchon weep and humbled Ferran Adrià. It is what the Japanese call an ichigen-san okotowari place, meaning “entry by invitation only.” Hattori was allowed to dine once a month with seven guests, and this month I was to be one of them.

On the flight, I stared down once more at snowcapped Mount Fuji passing by slowly below, yet I was feeling anything but serene. I was racked by anxiety, working myself up into a proper maelstrom of anticipatory angst. What was expected of me? Why had this rich, powerful, and influential man extended this remarkable invitation? More troubling still, would the food live up to the billing, and even if it did, would I be able to tell? Mibu had no website; in fact, there was no mention of it at all on the Internet. I had absolutely no idea what to expect, what to wear, or how to behave. Was I expected to pay, or at least offer to pay? Or would that cause offense? Whom would we be dining with? Just how many ways were there for me to disgrace myself with some oafish breach of etiquette?

Emi, who had helped me with some of my research, came along to act as interpreter. She tried to assuage my fears when we met that evening in Ginza, the heartland of Tokyo’s lavish, high-rolling dining and nightlife scene.

Ginza is home to some of the most expensive restaurants in the world. During Japan’s extraordinary economic rampage in the 1980s, this was where you came if you wanted to eat gold leaf–wrapped sushi off the belly of a naked woman—a style known as nyotaimori—or spend an average annual salary drinking rare single malts. Today, Ginza, with its redbrick grid of broad avenues and tree-lined side streets, originally developed by the British in the early twentieth century as an area for silver minting, still generates more wealth than many small nations and could easily lay claim to being the planet’s retail flagship.

Emi had called Hattori’s secretary and been told he would be paying and that we would be accompanied by a couple of food writers and three chefs from Hattori’s cooking school.

By the time we arrived outside one of Ginza’s best-known landmarks, the Sony Building, at six thirty in the evening, Hattori-san was already waiting, dressed in his customary deep black silk Mao jacket and rimless glasses, together with three men in dark suits and ties—the chefs—and two women dressed for the office in pencil skirts and white shirts—the food writers. We all chatted briefly, making introductions.

Hattori led us down a side road and around a corner to an anonymous building whose open front led to a strip-lit staircase. It looked more like the entrance to a multistory parking lot than a restaurant, but we followed him up two flights of stairs.

We were greeted at the entrance by the chef’s wife, Tomiko Ishida, an imposing woman in her late sixties dressed in a magnificent dark kimono, a glossy black crest of hair crowning her cherubic face. Mibu has but one small, low-lit, windowless dining room, given over to the member and his guests each evening. As we were shown through from the entrance, I looked down at the floor. The flagstones had recently been dampened—a Japanese custom intended to express hospitality. Inside the dining room, the pale clay walls were timbered with hinoki wood, the most luxurious and costly paneling you can get in Japan, used for the coffins of emperors. But Mibu was neither glitzy nor ostentatious, far from it. The room was very simple, decorated in a Zen style with just a scroll and a vase—both, admittedly, priceless.

We sat at tatami-covered tables, not on the floor, which was some relief. I sat across from Hattori, with Emi on his left, the journalists to my right, and the chefs, who remained silent throughout the evening, taking assiduous notes and photographs, on my left.

Chef Hiroshi Ishida has run Mibu for over thirty years, his wife explained as she offered us sake from a pot with an unusually long spout. She poured it from a height, as you might ouzo. “This is the ancient way,” she explained. “When there was a risk of poisoning, if you poured like this, the oxygen would mean the sake was less acidic and there was less danger.” The pot was worth ¥1 million ($9,000), apparently. She drew our attention to the scroll on the wall. It was of a dancer. “This is seventy years old. See how she is drawn with one unbroken line.” I imagined the decades of study that had led to the point at which the artist was able to create something of such simplicity. “We get power from art,” the chef’s wife said quietly, almost to herself, as she left the room.

When she returned with the first course, she introduced the flowers that were the only other decorative feature of the room; they were hamagiku, or white beach chrysanthemums, representative of the autumn festival period and a celebration of the countryside—the theme of that evening’s meal.

The first course was a clear dashi with a fan-shaped ginkgo leaf floating on the surface. Beneath was a ginkgo fritter—chewy, nutty, and bitter—and a sliver of poached gobi fish. It was an elegant, refreshing start to the meal. “Eat the ginkgo leaves, too,” advised Ishida’s wife. “They are very good for vitamins against dementia.”

“The chef has a real appreciation of the four seasons,” Hattori said. “I have been coming here twelve times a year for sixteen years, and every time is an evocation of the month we are in. You have to eat food in season; that’s the only time you can enjoy the moment. It has to be fresh every day.”

Tomiko-san brought some grilled ayu, a seasonal river fish. “It goes well with sake. Note the bitterness of the guts,” said Hattori.

The fish, caught by fishermen using trained cormorants, had been grilled whole, including the innards, and was served in a plain paper cone. She showed me how to pinch the flesh on the tail together to release it from the bones, and then eat around the spine.

“This is the time when the ayu fish return down the river fat and pregnant. Her life is finished. The fisherman prayed all day and asked the ayu to be medicine, so we appreciate it,” she said.

The oily saltiness of the fish went perfectly with the chilled sake, while the bitter aftertaste from the guts of the fish was a welcome challenge to the palate, just lifting it from a complacent comfort zone. Shizuo Tsuji writes of the ayu that it is “the pièce de résistance of Japanese grilled foods and one of the few Japanese dishes in which the bitterness is meant to be enjoyed.” While it is the least employed of the five tastes in the West, bitterness is an interesting element of Japanese cuisine. The ginkgo nuts, too, had a bitter aftertaste that helped cut through their chewy, cloying texture.

“I could see you were getting hot,” Tomiko-san said, returning with a plate of sashimi. It was bonito, a rainbow of purple and red, and below that, beneath a layer of crushed ice, sashimi of gobi fish. Was it the greatest sashimi I had ever had? No question. This was properly fresh bonito that had never been frozen. Unlike the bonito or tuna I had eaten before, whose flesh had so often been colored and degraded into a soft, sometimes mushy mass, this required effort to chew. It had texture and flavor.

Eggplant was next. Often, Tomiko-san said, chefs reject fruits and vegetables late in their season, thinking they are past their best, but her husband realized that late crops were full of flavor. Indeed, he relished working with vegetables that other chefs might discard. The eggplant we were about to eat, for example, was at the nagari stage of the season, the end (the other two stages are hashari, the beginning of the season, and sakari, the ripe stage).

“We enjoy very much the end of the vegetable’s life; we take care of it. It is a principle of our cooking. These vegetables are with us only for three or four months of the year, then they are gone. We won’t be able to eat them again, so we celebrate them until they have gone.”

The eggplant was slippery and fall-apart tender; I had never experienced such an intense eggplant taste before. Eggplant is often just a sponge for oil and other flavors, but this one, which I assumed had been gently steamed, had not only retained its flavor but intensified it. It was served with tiny, soft yams the size of marbles.

Until now the meal had been fascinating, revelatory, and delicious, but things took a turn for the transcendent with the next course, hamo, or pike conger, served in a dashi scattered with yellow chrysanthemum petals.

I took a sip of the gently steaming dashi—thickened with kuzu or arrowroot, which gives body without tainting the flavor in the way that conventional Western thickeners like flour, butter, or cornstarch do—and literally convulsed with pleasure. Hattori saw my reaction, smiled, and nodded to himself.

“You see, I really wanted you to try a proper dashi,” he said. “Now you know what I was talking about. This is the number one dashi in Japan. Usually, restaurants prepare dashi in the morning, but here it is prepared right at this very moment; the katsuobushi is shaved at the last minute. The smell of dashi evaporates quickly, so usually there is only a faint trace, but here you get the full flavor.”

My embarrassing shudder of pleasure was involuntary, like a mini-orgasm. Every hair on my body had stood on end. It was as if the chef had found a taste receptor I never knew I had, some kind of palate G-spot, and performed a kind of culinarylingus. The soup had a deep meatiness, an addictive, savory foundation above which danced teasingly tangy notes of the sea. It was impossible to divide its flavor from its aroma, which I suspect is where the great power of this dashi, of any good dashi, lay. I would give anything to experience it again.

“You know,” said Hattori, “Ishida just came up with this dish this afternoon. In ten years, I have never eaten the same dish twice. That is almost one and a half thousand dishes, all different.”

“But, but…” I stammered, incredulous. “I don’t believe it. It is like this dish has always been around. This dish must have existed before; it is so good.”

“That is just what Ferran Adrià said when he ate here,” said Hattori triumphantly. “He said it was like Ishida-san’s food must always have been with us. If you really want to experience the core, the fundamentals of Japanese food, this is the place. Much cooking destroys the essential flavor of ingredients, but he makes the most of them.”

As always in a Japanese meal, the arrival of the rice signaled the end of the savory courses, but this was not the usual bowl of plain rice to “fill a hole.” Instead, we were served exquisite, soft, warm sticky rice studded with chestnuts from Tamba.

Dessert was a kogyoku apple from Gunma Prefecture, cooked in thin slices and as light as a communion host. It was served, Tomiko-san explained, on rare silverware, the only type they could find that could hold perfect droplets of apple juice without them running. It looked like the plate was speckled with Swarovski crystals. “This is the ultimate dessert!” said Hattori.

Ishida-san brought it in to us himself. He was a short, straight-backed, stocky man, with a shaved head and the kindest face, dressed in a single-breasted white jacket and dark trousers—a gentle grandfather.

I stood up to shake his hand, but he gestured, smiling, that I should sit. I asked where he found his inspiration for the constant renewal of his menu. “It is very difficult. But I am always looking to get better at what I do every month,” he said.

“He is competing against himself!” said Hattori. “Nobody can cook like him.”

Where did he get all of his ingredients? From Tsukiji? “Of course, I do sometimes go to Tsukiji, but mostly I have direct contact with my suppliers, with my fishermen.”

If you go to eat at the restaurants of one of the great European or American chefs—Alain Ducasse or Thomas Keller, for instance—the food is generally a direct expression of the chef’s personality or ego; there are other top-class restaurants—Nobu, say, or the Ivy—where you go for the ambience, the decor, excessive fawning from the waitstaff, or to spot famous people; and then there are the celebrity chef joints like Anthony Bourdain’s Brasserie Les Halles, in New York, or any of the Gordon Ramsay places—to be honest, I am not sure why anyone would go to those, as it is about as likely that the celebrity chef in question will be working in the kitchen as it is that a member of the Ford family has built your Fiesta.

But Mibu was something else. It wasn’t really a restaurant in any conventional Western sense of the word. You didn’t go for the decor, to be seen, or because it was prestigious or a celebrity hangout. You went for the narrative, for what the food told you about nature, flavor, and texture, perhaps even about yourself. It was dining as a spiritual experience, as an evocation of history, as philosophy, as a path to deeper mysteries of life, creation, death, and nature. Something elemental, in both senses of the word—both basic and fundamental and of the earth. And I am sure I missed around 80 percent of the meaning and references.

“Customers are like patrons of artists for us,” Ishida’s wife told me. “This food is not something you can buy with money. God gives you the time to enjoy this moment, but you need to have the ability to enjoy it, which is priceless.”

It was a seismic moment in my life as an eater. The ingredients were rigorously seasonal. The flavors were pure, representative of the ingredients, subtle but intense when required. Somehow, Ishida was able to overlay different flavors, different intensities of taste within the same dish, yet with each remaining clearly identifiable. How often do we hear the chef behind the latest hot destination in London, Paris, or New York say that his or her food is “seasonal, fresh, local, and simple” before being presented with a plate of foam, gelatin, sous vide this or pureed that; food in towers; food compressed into ring molds; sauces smeared to look, as one critic memorably put it, “as if someone wearing stilettos had slipped in goose shit”? I admit, I spent a year training to make this kind of food, and then worked in two Michelin-starred Parisian kitchens serving it to customers with precision-placed chervil leaves, sticky reduced stocks, and absurdly turned vegetables, but now I knew better. At Mibu, the plating was elegant but without extraneous fuss. The food looked as if it had simply arrived in position.

It was a stark contrast to a meal I’d had a couple of nights earlier, on the thirty-eighth floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. The Tapas Molecular Bar is one of the hottest restaurants in Tokyo, with space at its counter for just six diners. The Japanese American chef, Jeff Ramsay, served us dishes that were part food, part magic trick: olive oil granita, made by pouring the oil into dry ice; a deconstructed miso soup; and carrot caviar, a classic El Bulli dish made by dropping carrot juice into a calcium chloride solution so that it formed small, soft spheres. It was the antithesis of Mibu—raw ingredients utterly transformed, unrecognizable. Some would dismiss this as too much “messing around” with food, and it is tempting to see Ramsay’s style of cooking as a kind of corruption, but personally I feel there is plenty of room for both approaches to the preparation of food, and, once in a while at least, I find the invention and theatricality of so-called molecular cuisine absolutely thrilling. At least there are no airs of “simplicity” and “purity” with this kind of cooking. And I’ll never forget the effect of a “miracle fruit” (Synsepalum dulcificum), a small, olive-type berry that grows wild in Africa, which, after you chew it a little, turns raw lemon wedges sweet.

But there was a poignancy to our meal at Mibu, an elegiac quality, which, had it not been such a joyous, sensual feast, might almost have been melancholy. The food worked on so many levels: visually, cerebrally, in terms of flavor, and viscerally. Ishida-san cooked with his heart and spirit. He and his food were indivisible. The dishes he had created especially for us that evening—never to be repeated—were born of a lifetime’s experience and a depth of understanding of Japanese culture that few Japanese chefs could match and even fewer will attain in the future. There had been around ten courses, but by the end I felt neither bloated nor hungry but perfectly, blissfully sated. “Another good restaurant might manage a couple of courses of this standard, but never be consistent over so many,” agreed Hattori.

As we were leaving, we were each given plastic bags with some more of the apple dessert, some foil-wrapped sashimi, and another ziplock bag of some of Ishida’s own katsuobushi shavings.

By the doorway, I asked Tomiko-san how old her husband was.

“Sixty-five,” she said.

“Oh, he can go on cooking for years yet,” I said.

“No,” she said quietly so that he couldn’t hear. “By cooking he is cutting his life short.”

It is only in the last month or so, as I continue to reflect on that evening, that the fundamental lesson of my visit to Mibu has become apparent: that to be a truly great chef, to excel in your métier, surpass your peers, and create something beyond a meal, you must above all else have humility: humility regarding your craft, so that you are constantly striving to learn and are open to new ways and ingredients; humility toward your peers, so that you never rest on your laurels; but, above all, crucially, humility toward the ingredients, because without the produce, without the fruit and the fish, the meat and the vegetables, a chef is nothing. Ishida employed his produce with the greatest respect, allowing its flavors to vibrate with a purity that I could work years to achieve but in reality would probably never even dare to attempt, because as well as humility, that kind of simplicity takes a lifetime’s experience. I know that using the word courage in the context of a kitchen may sound preposterous, but to serve a steamed eggplant naked and to present this as your best work takes some front.

When Michelin published its first Tokyo guide a few weeks later to a fanfare of publicity and outrage in both the Japanese and French capitals—Tokyo was judged to be worthy of almost twice as many stars as Paris—Mibu was nowhere to be found. It was not even mentioned among the restaurants that had refused to participate in the inspector’s assessment.

Sometimes I wonder if it ever existed.