YOSUKE ICHIKAWA’S SOUL FOOD FOR THE SPIRIT

世界のグルメ天国、ニューヨーク。今、NYは和食ブームの最中なのだが、日本食と言えばお寿司、黒豚などの高級な素材を使った料理しか思いつけないぐらい贅沢なイメージ。NYの旅行帰りにさっぱりしたのを食べたくなって、鎌倉の小町通り沿いの「なると屋＋典座」に行ってきた。シェフのイチカワヨウスケさんは京都で菜食の精進料理を修業してから、鎌倉に移って旬の野菜をうまく活かした「純」和食を展開。

On the first night of my recent trip to New York, a friend asked if I would be interested in going to Hakata Tonton, a restaurant specializing in Kyushu’s Japanese “soul food”, to sample their special multi-course all-pork extravaganza.

“I didn’t think you’d be interested in doing Japanese, having just arrived from Tokyo,” he smiled sheepishly. He was right, but for the wrong reason. I’ve always thought these themed riffs on single ingredients had something a bit gimmicky about them. Why impose this gratuitous restriction on yourself? I understand one of the dinner’s objectives was to showcase Kyushu’s fine produce – which extends far and wide beyond its fabled pork – but in any case I wasn’t really feeling in the mood for anything too calorific (as it turned out, we ended up at a tapas place, where we couldn’t resist ordering a small portion of braised pork belly from their list of Berkshire pork specials).

It seemed New York was still in the throes of its love affair with fat-streaked pork and other cholesterol-boosting delicacies. April Bloomfield, co-owner of the West Village gastropub The Spotted Pig, was packing in the crowds at The Breslin, her new restaurant at the hipster-Americana Ace Hotel that also features a pork-heavy menu. My stomach began to revolt a bit after ten days of all that meaty food, so I was happy to come back to Tokyo and enjoy some Japanese food of quite a different style from that of places like Hakata Tonton.

Yosuke Ichikawa is a young chef from Kyoto who trained as a shojin-ryori (vegetarian Buddhist temple cuisine) specialist. In 2006, he published a lovingly photographed cookbook of his recipes in collaboration with Tomoo Shoken, a respected writer on Japanese ceramics and crafts who also runs her own shop out of her hilltop home in Kamakura. Ichikawa’s food looks deceptively simple, but is deviously tricky to get right: fresh produce in season, minimally fiddled with, and simply seasoned. Carefully arranged on roughly-finished plates and bowls in burnished tones selected by Shoken, Ichikawa’s vegetarian food tantalizes with its vivid colors and flavors that sing confidently without resorting to elaborate preparations.

His restaurant Naruto-ya + Tenzo is located along Komachi Dori, one of Kamakura’s main shopping drags. The menu is brief, changing every month or so according to the season. On a recent summer evening, it featured only one “June meal” consisting of rice and soup with three to four main dishes, and a bowl of udon noodles in a clear, savory broth thickened with arrowroot starch, accompanied by three small sides. Small, unglazed ceramic bowls on a lacquered tray covered in a linen cloth contained pumpkin, winter melon and lightly-battered burdock in a dashi broth laced with grated sesame, a rich red miso soup with mozuku and oka-hijiki seaweed, boiled sweet potatoes with edamame soybeans, and a “shooter” of blanched tomatoes in a chilled dashi stock.

Even in cities like New York, enamored of the “simplicity” and clean, umembellished flavors of Japanese cuisine, the food tends to lean heavily on expensive luxuries like fresh air-freighted seafood and meat. Simplicity of preparation in the kitchen is offset by the elaborate logistics of sourcing “authentic” ingredients from halfway around the world. A very expensive form of austerity – but then most Japanese food lovers abroad seem to be affluent consumers who have become accustomed to the sort of extravagant gastronomy that exists half a world away from Ichikawa’s modest, healthy, but flavorful and seasonally-aware cuisine.