The business district of Tokyo is a maze of corporate canyons buzzing with salarymen, traders, deal makers, captains of industry, glossy black limos, and money. At least it is on weekdays. On weekends it is desolate. There might as well be tumbleweed. There actually are giant jungle rooks, wheeling in the sky like vultures. All of which means there is no one to ask for directions. When you get lost. And can’t find what you have been assured by your friend Toshi is the best tempura restaurant in the city. And your wife and children are wilting in the midday heat. And you have been walking for an hour promising them that it is “not far now…” or “just around this corner…” and for the last half hour you have been buckling under the burden of a drowsy four-year-old who weighs roughly the same as an air-conditioning unit and is sitting on your shoulders.
Street numbers in Tokyo do not appear to be arranged according to any logical order, so that 1 Yoko Ono Avenue will not necessarily be at the beginning of the street but might just as easily be next to number 302 and across the street from number 25. How anything gets delivered is one of the great inscrutable mysteries of the East, but I do know that if you are trying to find the anonymous doorway of a small, one-room, local restaurant that has no external number or sign, not even a kanji character that you might match to the one on a crumpled piece of paper in your hand, or indeed any evidence that it is a restaurant of any kind, then you might as well go whistle.
We were about to give up hope when, suddenly, seemingly from nowhere, a tiny, wizened old man, bent almost double, with close-cropped gray hair and a knobby walking stick, appeared in front of us. Quickly, I shoved my crumpled note under his nose. He took it with a shaky hand, spent some minutes examining it from all angles, then eventually turned and beckoned us to follow. A left turn, a right turn, and across a street, he stopped in front of a doorway concealed by various potted plants and a beaded curtain and gestured toward it with an open palm. Holding my breath, for I dared not believe this was our tempura Valhalla, I parted the curtain and waved the piece of paper at a passing waiter. He nodded confirmation and handed me a menu. Lissen and the kids had started to follow me into the restaurant. I turned to thank the old man, but he had completely disappeared from view. Had he been a phantom? A mere apparition, a Fata Morgana somehow conjured by our collective desperation? Had we willed him into existence?
No. I looked down, and there he was, smiling. I thanked him, attempted to bow even lower than he, and invited him in to join us. He shook his head vigorously, waving his hands as if I had invited him to an opium den, and we parted.
We had just made the end of the lunchtime service and were shown to a small side room, where we sat down on the tatami floor, accompanied by what would over the next couple of months become my customary crescendo of clicks, pops, and crunches from my aging bones.
We ordered whitebait, squid, eel, and shrimp, the latter’s heads served separately, much to Asger’s and Emil’s consternation. It was exquisite, all of it: the crunchy, gnarled batter glistening yet virtually greaseless; the fish cooked to moist, still-steaming perfection within. The meal ended with a lip-smackingly savory miso soup with minuscule clams floating on the surface and a crispy-sweet, raggedy fritter of scallops each the size of Emil’s fingernail, called kakiage tendon, held together with a nut-brown batter and served on rice to indicate the end of the meal. Even Asger and Emil agreed it had been worth the walk.
Toshi had assured me that if I mentioned his name, the chef might talk to me.
This seemed generous of him, but I had learned to be wary of Toshi’s assistance. Back in Paris he had helped me to write a Japanese business card, a meishi, as I knew that they were essential for almost any kind of social interaction in Japan. It was only when another Japanese acquaintance of mine had chanced to see the dummy of the card, a day before I was due to take it to the printer, that I learned that, instead of “Michael Booth, Journalist, England,” Toshi had in fact written “Please help me, I have learning difficulties.”
Still, I took the chance and mentioned his name to the waiter, who passed it on to the chef, who soon appeared by the entrance to our room. Some more diners had arrived; would I like to come and watch him work in the kitchen?
I was dying to know the secret of great tempura with that chiffon-like carapace, craggy with nodules of light brown, deep-fried batter, with just-cooked vegetables or fish within. Why was it so different from British fish-and-chips batter, which tends to be smooth and heavy with oil, its interior often overcooked?
“It is all about your knowledge of the fish,” the chef explained in his cramped open kitchen, our faces burning in the heat from the shimmering oil. “And the vegetables. And the seasons. And the oil. And the batter. I trained for ten years. It was one year before they allowed me to mix the batter.”
Clearly, I was going to struggle to master this during a lunch sitting. As Shizuo Tsuji writes in A Simple Art, “Although the technique of deep-frying was originally introduced to Japan centuries ago by Europeans and Chinese, the Japanese have elevated it to its very apogee of refinement.” He then offers elaborate instructions on how to fold the paper on which you present the tempura. Quite. But the chef did let me in on a few secrets: first, the batter. This was made from just flour, water, and egg, but the water was ice-cold; he used his own special blend of tempura flour, which included a little baking powder and rice powder, and the eggs were ultrarich, as Japanese eggs usually are. You add them to the bowl in the order of flour, water, and egg, so that the food gets coated with egg first and flour last, and use it immediately (there is no resting in the fridge as you do with traditional beer batter). The next secret is that you must, at all costs, resist the urge to overmix the batter, or koromo (literally “clothing” or “enrobed”). The chef used chopsticks to give it the most cursory of swirls.
“But you’ve got great lumps of flour sticking around the side of the bowl,” I said. This unmixed batter made me feel tense. I wanted to give it a good whisk.
He smiled enigmatically. “Yes. Lumps are good. Now, you need one pair of chopsticks to mix and cover with the batter, another to fry. Next, test the oil.” Most books say tempura oil should be at around 350°F, but an expert tempura chef will modify the temperature depending on what is being fried. He explained why: though the oil is 350°F, most of the items within the batter have a large water content, which means they won’t cook beyond 212°F—the water sets a ceiling on the temperature, which is also why the items you are frying should be as dry as possible before you start. The skill of the chef—and it is a highly specialized skill; good tempura chefs don’t cook anything else—is to know when the tempura is cooked to perfection inside. This depends on the ingredient being fried, of course, and on the batter, but also on how the batter is applied. With eel, for instance, the chef showed me how, after coating it with batter, he scraped the skin side so that the batter was thinner where the heat has to penetrate the skin.
I made an exasperated face, and the chef conceded that 350°F is fine for home cooking. In other words, a piece of bread should come fizzling to the surface almost immediately when you drop it in (although, should you find yourself cooking tempura for Japanese people, be warned that those from eastern Japan—the Kanto region—like theirs golden brown, while those from the west—Kansai—prefer their tempura pale and interesting).
He deftly lifted a shrimp with his extra-long chopsticks, placing it in the ceramic batter bowl, which was tilted at an angle for ease of access, before lowering it into the oil. After a few seconds he moved it around in the oil, then took it out again. “Is that it?” I asked. He nodded. “What exactly is the oil? Just vegetable?”
“Well, in Kanto, we put a little sesame oil in, but in Kansai they don’t. The important thing is not to put too many vegetables into the oil at the same time, or it will cool the oil and the batter won’t crisp.”
I have learned to my cost that such impatience is my most common failing, that and the fact that I usually get carried away and cook too much. After all, the human body can take only so much deep-fried food. The Japanese always serve tempura with grated daikon mixed in with the dipping sauce (made from a base of dashi, the Japanese “stock” made from seaweed and dried bonito fillet shavings, with mirin and light soy added—although tempura purists dip only in fine salt), because it is said to help the digestion of oily foods. The so-called Father of Japan, the legendary shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, is said to have died from eating too much tempura, and the Japanese remain wary of overindulgence to this day.
I tried to describe to the chef the concept of a deep-fried Mars bar. He squinted skeptically. I drew a picture in my notebook; he looked more dubious and called another chef over. They conferred and looked at me expectantly, awaiting further clarification. “In Scotland—you know, haggis? Sean Connery?”
“Besides guns and the Bible, they brought tempura,” writes old Japan hand Donald Richie of the European missionaries who came to Japan in the mid-sixteenth century.
Clearly, thankfully, there were no Scots among them.