Tamasaka: Modern Kaiseki

Tamasaka is a modern, airy restaurant located in the Marunouchi business district. The highlight here is the counter seating where you can view the kitchen staff painstakingly preparing and garnishing the dishes. Not much English is spoken and there is no English menu. However, if you can pretty much eat anything and are up for a taste adventure, you should be fine.

 We started with a summery appetizer consisting of cold winter melon and eel.

 Next course was a light consommé of fish tofu with vegetables - perfect to build up the appetite.

  This was followed by a small selection of sashimi - squid, tuna, yellowtail and prawn in a beautiful plate.

Next came a plate of various seasonal delicacies - sweet potato, tofu, grilled white fish and a whelk perched on a round of daikon. The green maple leaves were a nice touch  - highlighting that these were the bounty from the sea and land in early summer.

We then received another broth dish  with freshly-made soba and clams.

The next dish was a few slices of quality beef with salad. This was delicious.

Nearing the end, this was a fun dish and tasted great. They gave us raw scallop and a hot plate so that we could cook our own scallop.

By this time, I was quite full but we still had the requisite rice, miso soup and pickles. The rice was very delicately flavored with fish and peppers - a good counter-balance to the richer dishes that came before. 

Every dish was delicious - there was nothing that missed its mark. All in all, a reliable choice for an elegant kaiseki meal. Website is www.tamasaka.com and the place is easy to find in the Maronouchi Brick Square complex. 

Wadakura: Lunch Bento Present

I had stayed at the Palace Hotel prior to its renovation and although it was a little faded in its grandeur, its location overlooking the Imperial Palace complex cannot be beat.

Room with a View - Imperial Palace complex and moat with Shinjuku in the background

After its renovation in 2012 though, the new Palace Hotel was modern and luxurious, with custom artwork conveying various aspects of nature.

Little thoughtful touches were everywhere in the room - from the cast iron teapot to the monogrammed cotton nightshirt. I especially liked the mysterious pink welcome box when I first entered the room.

 The box is a little off-kilter as I moved it but rest assured the box and piece of paper was placed perfectly symmetrical on the wooden tray. This is what I love about Japan! The minimalistic beauty in small things.  The contrast between the round tray and a square box with a rectangular piece of paper. The contrast in 3 colors. The box was lifted to reveal some savory peanuts coated in a crunchy soy coating. Note how the sides of the bottom box opened up like a flower.

The breakfast was ridiculously expensive and did not seem worth it for coffee and pastries - JPY4,000 for a continental breakfast! However, lunch was another matter and I had the good fortune of having a kaiseki set lunch at Wadakura, the Palace Hotel's Japanese restaurant. Like the hotel, the surroundings were modern. The lunch was an absolute delight.

We started with a delicate stewed egg dish - chawanmushi with a little unagi (eel) and jizu-na (a gel-like seaweed) on top. It's been a long time since I enjoyed jizu-na and I must admit I love the gelatinous texture.

Next was a stack of bento boxes for each individual. Everyone loves getting presents. Half of the fun of opening boxes is the anticipation and excitement as you pull the ribbon and lift the lid.

Once the ribbon is pulled and you lay out your lunch boxes, it looks like this:

I'm not sure if there was an order but I started with the cold dish on the right which was silky tofu and asparagus. I then moved on to the fried karaage as it was piping hot. The top left dish was an assortment of fish and vegetables - all prepared slightly differently at room temperature. We were also given a side dish of sashimi:

The flowers are shiso flowers so I copied my colleagues who used their chopsticks to remove the flower buds off the stem to enjoy with the tuna sashimi. To finish, dessert was a creamy blancmange with a cup of matcha green tea.

This was an incredible lunch - the food presentation was impeccable but more importantly, everything tasted wonderful. Wadakura is located at The Palace Hotel in Marunouchi - http://www.palacehotel.co.jp/english/

Sakontaro: Slice of Kyoto in Tokyo

Paul and I lived in Japan from 2002-2004. We haven't been back since and I've been expectantly waiting for the opportunity. 12 years later, the chance finally emerged and I gladly made plans to meet up with old friends/colleagues, to eat the food I never stopped enjoying. Although I like many different types of Japanese food, ramen and sushi are more readily available outside of Japan. It made sense to focus on cuisine that is harder to come by such as kaiseki or tofu cuisine.

 Kaiseki is a traditional Japanese multi-course dinner that aims to highlight the food of the season. The way the ingredients are put together, the choice of dish ware and the cooking styles are all meant to express the season at that very moment. Dishes are usually elaborate and are painstakingly put together.

Mayumi had booked a table at Sakontaro -  which specialized in Kyoto cuisine with some Western fusion. As we walked through the noren curtains, we were greeted by staff on their knees with a deep bow. We took off our shoes and stepped onto the tatami mat. We were shown to a long bar table which overlooked a rock garden.

First order of business - ordering sake. Once Mayumi saw Dassai 39 on the sake menu, it was obvious what we should order. Dassai 39 is extremely popular in Japan right now and is not always to be found. It is a highly-polished sake which means it was incredibly smooth, round, very low acidity and fruity. The 39 in its name means that the rice was polished down to 39% of its original size. Sadly, I couldn't find this sake at the airport duty-free at all.

Bottle of Dassai 39 - we only had the small carafe

Mayumi had already ordered the set kaiseki dinner menu in advance. We started with some small bites - a cold silky tofu shaped like a flower and a couple of slices of pork.

The next dish was unexpectedly one of my favorites - 3 slices of duck prepared Western style. The greens was mizu-na - a peppery, piquant lettuce that is not as strong as arugula.

Next came a very refined chicken karaage - the food was not especially memorable but the dishware was beautiful!

Oddly, the next course was a cold but creamy potato soup with a few fried onion shavings. The dish was perfectly fine and it was only a few spoonfuls. It just felt a little out of kilter. The dish ware was incredible though - it looked like a sakura (cherry blossom) petal.

By now, I was getting a little full. Again, this dish was beautifully-presented but perhaps looked better than it tasted. I liked the individual ingredients - the aubergine, pepper and young ginger stalk. However, the meat inside the hollowed-out aubergine seemed too rich for the dish.

The next dish was the clear Japanese consommé - for me, always a highlight of kaiseki set dinners. First, a photo of the lacquer bowl itself.

For me, this is one of the more successful dishes since I like winter melon soup. The fish is hamo or dagger tooth pike conger which is a small bony fish. It often features in Kyoto menus in June since this is its season. The white fish was pepped up considerably by the addition of ume (sour plum).

Similar to Chinese banquets, the carbs come at the end. Our sweetcorn rice had been cooking in its pot for the last few courses and was finally ready. Unfortunately, I got the burnt bits at the bottom of the pot which I don't care for. The red miso soup was amazing! It is really hard to get good miso soup outside of Japan! It must be the quality of the miso and the dashi. Mayumi said helpfully(?) that she makes her own miso via fermentation and this is the only way to get good-quality miso.

Dessert time! By this time, I was really full but of course, there is a separate stomach for a few mouthfuls of dessert. The cake was moist but the standout here was the tofu ice cream. Less sweet and cloying than vanilla, it was a good ending.

All in all, there were some pleasant dishes but some misses too. The stand-out was the Dassai 39 sake and I thank Mayumi again and again for introducing me to an amazing sake. Bonus picture - the toilets were exquisite - a little Japanese garden where you had to wear wooden clogs on a pebblestone  floor. There was a goldfish in the bowl at the corner of the toilet.

Sakontaro is on a side street in Ginza, near the Shiseido building. Website is www.sakontaro.co.jp/ginza