The Man Who Ate the World: In Search of the Perfect Dinner

by Jay Rayner

  At the end, Mr. Yukimura and I exchange cards that neither of us can read and he bows to me and, unself-consciously I bow back. I am presented with a bill for 37,000 yen—around £163 pounds ($334)—and drop the plastic onto the shiny lacquered plate, convinced I have landed a bargain. Mr. Yukimura accompanies me to the lift and out onto the street, where he bows again to indicate our journey together this evening is over. In one way, it occurs to me, a part of my journey is over, too. I may not have slept in thirty hours. I may have no idea where I am. But I have just eaten what may well be a perfect meal.

  There are 60,000 restaurants in Tokyo. Or 120,000. Or 300,000. All of these numbers are quoted at me by one guidebook or another during my stay, but none is more revealing than the sight of the restaurants themselves. They are piled on top of one another, like children’s building blocks. They are crammed down the narrow side streets between skyscrapers, squeezed in along the major boulevards, secreted away in both the basements and uppermost floors of department stores. They are everywhere. The vast majority, obviously, are Japanese, and most of them offer just one style of cooking: here a tempura shop, there a sushi joint, over there a ramen bar. In the Japanese restaurant business the specialist is venerated over the generalist.

  But this is also a city where you can eat the world with only a subway pass. I am told, for example, that there are 20,000 Italian restaurants in Tokyo, from the simplest of pasta places to the Japanese outpost of Enotecha Pinchiorri, the famed Florentine gastro-temple. I come across American burger joints and English-style pubs, Spanish tapas bars and French brasseries. One afternoon I even pass a restaurant that announces on a big sign written in English, that it specializes in “Belarus Home Cooking,” which doesn’t strike me as something worth boasting about.

  That the Belarussians should have decided to make a go of it in Tokyo is really no surprise. Since 1965, when the great French chef Paul Bocuse made his first tour of Japan, everybody has been trying to make a go of it here. Big-name European and American chefs have seen Japan as a land of opportunity, for which read “nice consulting deals.” Long before they had a presence in Las Vegas or Dubai they were in Tokyo, starting with Maxim’s of Paris, which opened on the ground floor of the Sony building in the midseventies. Maxim’s was followed by the Troisgros brothers, and later by ventures bearing the name of Bocuse himself, and many others besides.

  Anybody with a passing knowledge of Japanese culture could quite reasonably have assumed that this influx of Western chefs would have left its mark upon Japanese cooking. The adoption of elements of foreign culture into Japanese life—or the concept of iitoko-dori, as it is known—has been so important to so much of the country’s development that it’s hard to imagine it not having an effect on the table. Certainly throughout its history Japan has taken various elements of other culinary traditions—the fermented soya bean and tea from China, the principles of tempura from the Portuguese—and made it their own.

  Curiously, though, the impact of the latest culinary invasion has not been on the hosts but on the new arrivals. While Japanese diners might be some of the most adventurous in the world, Japanese cuisine has proved resistant to any further innovation from beyond its own shores; meanwhile, Western haute cuisine has filched things left, right and center, like dodgy guests filling their pockets with the silver spoons while the hosts are out the room. Some of it has been direct and obvious, like the “discovery” by Ferran Adria at El Bulli in Spain of seaweed extracts the Japanese had known about for centuries, which could be used for making hot jellies (rather than the cold ones made from animal bone gelatines that melt above room temperature).

  Others were more subtle. Since the early 1990s, when both Thomas Keller’s French Laundry opened in California’s Napa Valley and El Bulli came to prominence, the convention of the Western multicourse tasting menu has stretched from a mere six or eight courses to a dizzying fifteen, twenty-five, or even forty. Keller himself defined a philosophy to go with it—“With each course we want to strike quick, mean and leave without getting caught,” he wrote, like some Norman Mailer of the stove, in a mission statement for his staff—though in reality these menus simply aped the traditional Japanese meal system.

  Joël Robuchon actively acknowledged the influence when he devised the L’Atelier format, which has since spread around the world, with its glossy black counter overlooking an open kitchen. In Europe it was easy to assume the primary influence to be the Spanish tapas bar, not least because a platter of the best hand-cut Iberico ham is always on the menu, but that’s simply because Robuchon likes his ham. A trip to L’Atelier in Tokyo’s Roppongi Hills quickly reveals the Japanese influence to be much stronger. In a meal pulled back to a succession of small tasting plates there is no space for the complex dishes of the grand old French kitchen, with their eight or ten elements. As with a Japanese dish, it becomes about showing each ingredient to its very best: a simple piece of Pyrenean milk-fed lamb, roasted and dressed with a little jus and nothing else, for example; a small but perfectly formed langoustine ravioli.

  Other, less-skilled chefs, have also discovered Japanese food, but only in the way teenagers discover sex: as a new and thrilling pursuit they know nothing about, but with which they are determined to enjoy experimenting. Across Europe and the Americas there have been unexpected outbreaks of ponzu and daikon, when lemon and radish would have done just fine. Unlikely ingredients have been plonked unceremoniously on top of cushions of rice in the bastardized name of sushi and perfectly innocent pieces of fish that would have been lovely seared in frothing butter have been left raw to indicate that the chef had either (a) discovered a new, Japanese-inspired purity that had helped him to redefine the very essence of his inner being, or (b) that he’d been hanging out after hours down at the local sushi bar, trying to grope the waitress.

  Most of these gastronomic calamities had the good manners to take place a long way from Japan’s shores, but there were some chefs who proved determined to re-import their knock-offs back to Tokyo. The most notable is Wolfgang Puck, whose restaurants, like some multi-drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis, have even spread across the city, knocking out seared hunks of tuna in an ersatz Asiatic style with ill-executed Caesar salads. No matter; there are so many eateries in Tokyo that it is possibly the one place in the world where someone like Puck can safely be ignored.

  To a greedy man the sight of all these restaurants should be encouraging. It should offer endless taste possibilities. Nevertheless, as I explore the unending low-rise concrete forest, I can’t escape a nagging fear that, after the joys of Yukimura, I am destined only for disappointment. My warped grasp of statistics tells me this has to be so: Even if the proportion of good to grim restaurants is higher in Tokyo than elsewhere, the sheer number of places in the city means there have to be, numerically, many more bad ones than elsewhere. Given what has begun to feel like my talent for finding a bad meal wherever I happen to travel, I am certain to sit down in the wrong place. I am sure it’s going to happen.

  This nagging fear is not helped by the fact that my next booking is at the restaurant of a man who, up to this point, has only ever disappointed me. His name is Pierre Gagnaire, and in Paris his restaurant has three Michelin stars.

  This should mean he is good. This should mean he is among the best. But, in this business, I have realized, nothing is guaranteed. For many years I had been intrigued by Gagnaire, a tall, long-limbed man with a bouffant mane of salt-and-pepper hair, a manicured beard, and a bright, toothy smile that makes him look like either the forgotten Bee Gee or the life model for the illustrations in the 1970s edition of The Joy of Sex. Some people had described Gagnaire to me as a genius, a man who reconfigured the very notion of the meal and who, through his riffs on ingredients, made you look anew at what it was to eat.

  Other people I had spoken to thought—and this, after much careful consideration—that he was now a bit of an arse. Increasingly I had come to agree with them. A few months before my trip to Tokyo, Gagn
aire was the star turn at a conference of chefs in London that I attended, where he gave a cookery demonstration. However, we were told grandly before he began, he would not be cooking one of his signature dishes. Gagnaire was an artist. Therefore he would cook as the mood took him, according to what appealed from among the ingredients laid out before him on the stage. He would Create.

  The result was a car crash, relayed to a gawping crowd who had come to worship and quickly found themselves mislaying their faith: here some foie gras, there some scarlet, acidulated jelly, in between a sliver of crisp chicken skin, perhaps a scatter of peanuts. All it was missing was a shot glass of Gaviscon on the side. It was less a dish than a cacophony of stuff clattering across the plate.

  A little later I was invited to witness Gagnaire in action again, at a dinner for a few freeloading restaurant critics at his London restaurant, Sketch. I accepted the invitation greedily, eager still to find out what all the fuss was about. On the day I received a call from his PR woman telling me that once more Pierre was “going to Create.” The great man was going off menu, off piste, quite possibly off his head.

  What she didn’t mention was that he would also be waiting on us, accompanying every tray to the dining room so he could place the dishes before us. We were reduced to a rumble of artificial purrs and simulated gasps of ecstasy as the man watched us eat. After the event we were sent the menu and it read like serious modern French food, which is to say, as a game of word association: There was “octopus broth, razor clams, cubes of rock red mullet, anchovy pizza” or “gray shrimp jelly, mozzarella ice cream, fennel and asparagus heads.” On the plate and in the mouth, however, it was a puff of nothing, bland and unmoving, a set of paintings with ingredients used only for their color rather than their flavor. Looking later at that menu, not a single taste came back to me. Perhaps he had once been great. Perhaps Gagnaire had been a superstar chef of Bee Gee proportions. But now it seemed to me that he was, like The Joy of Sex model by the last page of the book, completely spent.

  Being in Tokyo, however, I realized I had an opportunity to give him one last chance. Here, a long way from Paris, there was no way Gagnaire could suddenly go off menu because, of course, he and that menu were separated by thousands of miles. Curiously, his absence from the restaurant that bore his name was finally a positive.

  Gagnaire’s Tokyo restaurant is perched on the top floor of a glass tower above Aoyama, the most expensive district in town. Here, Prada, Gucci, and Chanel jostle for space, and most people’s underwear costs more than the shoes you have on right now. It is the perfect location for Gagnaire: His ornately tiled circular dining room is more than an equal to the flash and sparkle of the high-class retail joints below.

  In Paris, Gagnaire made his name by serving five or six different dishes at once for each course. In Paris, I had been told, it could seem contrived as if, like some hyperactive toddler, he was incapable of focusing on one idea. Here, though, surrounded by the kimono-clad ladies who lunch, in a city where everything is about precision, the isolating of these flavors one from another is suddenly appropriate. At the beginning there is a tiny bowl of soft and perfectly executed gnocchi flavored with pumpkin and Parmesan. The earthiness of that dish is echoed by a smooth velouté of Jerusalem artichokes with a little salted egg yolk, and alongside it as though the land has slipped quietly away into the sea, a lovely fish soup, rich and intense with a long, peppery end, which is simply the best version of itself that I have ever tried.

  The meal is full of wonders: a carpaccio of Wagyu beef curled around a jelly of beef consommé. A dish listed simply as “pork” that breaks the animal down into thin slices of the belly with a compôte of preserved fruits, dense savory nuggets of loin, and crispy pieces of the skin. It is a dazzling display of virtuosity, full of big, clean flavors and satisfying textures, served with a wry self-confidence. The Japanese waiters know that the parade of warped and twisted crockery upon which all these dishes are served is absurd (for at Gagnaire, very little comes on a mere plate), but they know, too, that when you taste the food, it will make sense.

  As the meal begins to wind down through a series of riffs on apple, and another on mango, and a third on strawberries, I also begin to relax. In Tokyo, it seems to me, even Gagnaire is good. I immediately decide that this must be the greatest food city in the world. I am happy and in a very profound way, for I now know that it will be impossible to eat badly here.

  I am also wrong.

  It was when the waiter scooped the lavender ice cream into the green bean soup that I began to have serious doubts. There are lots of good places for lavender; ice cream isn’t one of them. Food flavored with lavender makes me think only of an old lady’s underwear drawer. I tried the tepid, overly sweet bean soup, mixed in a little of the loose ice cream, and concluded that it was the sort of soft-textured dish that would indeed suit an old lady, especially one with her teeth out.

  I was not having a good time.

  This was a disappointment. Hiramatsu is the flagship restaurant of legendary Japanese chef Hiroyuki Hiramatsu, who made his name by choosing not to cook Japanese food. Instead, he decided to become a French chef. In this he was not unique. The highly regarded Tsuji Culinary Institute in Osaka has been turning out Japanese chefs, trained in the repertoires of France and Italy, since the mid 1960s. Its graduates make up most of the brigades of the Western chefs with restaurants in Tokyo, and a number have gone on to open their own places in the city. Hiramatsu took it a step further. Not only does he have restaurants in Tokyo, he eventually opened a restaurant in Paris, which now holds two Michelin stars.

  Today he heads an empire of cafés and brasseries, high-end dining places and partnerships with Paul Bocuse. I had wanted to meet him, but he was out of town, opening another business. Instead I was making do with dinner at his first restaurant, which opened in 1982.

  It was not a good experience from the start. They had insisted I come at 6 p.m., but when I arrived, I was the only customer. I was led through a foyer, hung with glowering oil paintings dominated by their dour, overly ornate frames, to an empty and thickly carpeted bar area on the first floor, where I was abandoned to the stygian gloom with just a menu to hide behind. I’d soon had enough of solitary confinement and stepped out of the room to find two waiters lurking outside the doorway, like pallbearers anticipating the call. I asked to be taken to my table. I was led upward to the equally deserted dining room on the floor above, which was little better. It was all silly chandeliers and claw-footed chairs and deathly hush. None of the staff smiled. They seemed determined to avoid eye contact. Then I noticed their outfits, and I began to understand their melancholy. They were wearing tailcoats. I have not seen waiters wearing tailcoats in a big-ticket restaurant since sometime way back in the last century. Yet, here they were, stiff and uneasy in their flapping jackets.

  It all felt like a gross and foolish parody of what a grand French restaurant is supposed to be. In his astute and broadly sympathetic book Inventing Japan, the journalist and writer Ian Buruma describes how, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Japanese establishment responded to the perception that the country was culturally and socially backward by trying to be more Westernized than the West. What he describes as the “high tide of ostentatious Europeanized posturing” was a ball held in 1885 by the foreign minister to mark the Emperor’s birthday.

  It took place in a pavilion, designed in a mixture of “high Victorian, French Empire and Italian Renaissance styles,” and filled with men in tailcoats and women in huge hooped satin dresses. “Doing their best to strike the proper European attitudes, gentlemen puffed Havana cigars and played whist,” Buruma writes, “while others picked at the truffles and paté and ice cream sorbets laid out on the buffet tables.”

  Here I was, more than 120 years later, and in this room it seemed nothing had changed. There was still a part of Japanese society that was trying to ape the West, and doing so in a clumsy, anachronistic manner. It was not enough, apparently,
to be a French restaurant. It had to be grand stupid French. It had to be all the grand stupid things about French restaurants that are wrong. If the food had been nice to eat—the delicious, technically precise take on the great French repertoire that I had been told to expect—it might not have mattered, but it wasn’t. If anything, after the ill-judged lavender ice cream–bean soup combo, dinner took a turn for the worse.

  Once-beautiful langoustine were served tepid under a strange cheesy crust, with strands of orange zest on top of what was described as a potato tart. It wasn’t. It was a tablet of overset potato mousse, which tasted of potato not at all. After that came a main course of pink lamb sliced so thin and laid so flat on the plate, it looked like wet, sweaty ham. It, too, did not taste of itself, under an armed and violent assault by truffles and reduced meat juices so that the only real flavor was of sticky demi-glace sauce.

  All of this was served with the kind of enthusiasm and jollity one might expect of waiters who had heard only that morning that their mothers had all died unexpectedly of Plague. I have a curious, perhaps eccentric expectation of expensive restaurants, which is this: The more money I spend, the better a time I should have. I am always baffled when all it buys is formality and stiffness, as though what you had actually purchased was entry to a religious ritual, with an emphasis on the finer points of sadomasochism. I don’t go out to eat so I can pay homage. If I wanted that, I’d go around my mother’s place for dinner. I want what all eaters want: pleasure. Eating at Hiramatsu was not a pleasure.

  Some might argue that I was merely experiencing a cultural clash between the Japanese tendency toward politeness and deference on the one hand, and the tendency toward exuberant hedonism of the fat Jewish boy on table seven on the other. I don’t think so. After all, Jun Yukimura had been the perfect host. No, it wasn’t about the manner of Japanese people. It was about these people, regardless of their nationality.