- Shibumi means creative restraint.
If there's no restraint, then we start getting so creative.
It means our insecurity comes out.
The master doesn't get creative.
The master just does.
Welcome, good evening.
Kappo cuisine, it means cooking and cutting
in front of the guests.
The other thing that kappo has to have
is basically the forms of kaiseki cuisine,
in which you have something raw, steamed,
boiled, fried, and grilled.
I was drawn to kappo ryori
because I realized that kaiseki was really daunting,
just for myself, period.
I was told a very great statistic.
90% of Japanese restaurants
in the United States have sushi on the menu.
Also, 90% of Japanese restaurants in Japan
do not have sushi on the menu.
What does that mean?
Well, we don't serve sushi here.
And here we have the wild moray eel.
They're coming from Oita in Kyushu.
We receive moray eel about once a year.
Moray eel is quite the gangster of fish
it which it is in the top of the food chain,
which most fish won't even go near it.
Some of the varieties are quite poisonous.
They are very vicious, very muscular,
very, very fast, and quite camouflaged.
The moray eel is, they're beasts,
but the flesh is really beautiful.
What also makes the moray so special
is that it's extremely fatty.
It has this really thick layer of fat
between the meat and the skin.
Now if you see how thick that is, that is fat.
This is really beautiful.
Basically all eels are one of the most
difficult things to filet, the moray being a little,
even more difficult because of the skin.
The skin is so thick, and once you penetrate that
you got to go through the fat.
And once you go through the fat,
then you get into the meat.
So we leave the skin on here because it's so fatty.
It's really nice.
So this is how we're gonna serve it tonight.
You skewer and you grill beforehand, okay?
Once it gets cooked, we flip it over,
and we create what's called kobashi,
it means roasty and toasty.
So it gives that flavor once you simmer it.
If you take a fish and you just boil it,
it's not gonna be toasty, right?
So you grill and then boil it, kobashi ni narimasu.
Traditional nitsuke, no dashi, okay?
It's three parts sake, one soy sauce, one sugar.
The most pivotal experience I had after culinary school
was stepping foot into a three Michelin star restaurant
by the name of George Blanc.
That was just outside of Lyon, 26 chefs in the kitchen.
Another very pivotal moment
was the day I stepped foot
into Ginza Sushi-ko, owned by Masa Takayama.
I was the first white guy to work for Masa.
Wow, did he give me a whirlwind
of what a Japanese kitchen is.
And that's after working for multiple
three Michelin star restaurants in France.
I didn't know what was coming.
Masa is a dazzling genius in the kitchen.
So it was a great honor.
Sea cucumber is a great delicacy
found on the bottom of the ocean.
Has extremely high umami content.
It has a beautiful texture,
and is definitely one of my favorites.
The texture is probably 50% important
of the dish as the taste.
In the Western world, it's probably about 90/10.
Chinese, Japanese, probably 50/50.
They really enjoy the texture.
If you look at abalone, sea cucumber,
these are textural wonders,
in which we're just not used to in the West.
So the sea cucumber initially is very globuly and soft.
It has zero texture to it at all.
Once you start cleaning it,
it starts tensing up, it gets very firm.
It's tensing up right now.
Its defense mechanism.
So after we open it up, there's the beak here
which is the only part that gets removed.
So this is the beak right here.
It's the opening of the sea cucumber.
Pretty nice yield.
This is all edible.
Just that.
Sea cucumber has a lot of umami.
If you cook it delicately in sake and kombu,
both high umami content,
and then you take it out, cut it,
you simmer it with a little bit of dashi,
there's a little bit of chew, oceanic flavor,
melting in the mouth and it's just really nice.
So we have here the large abalone from Chiba
which is just east of Tokyo.
How much are they?
For both of 'em?
- [Sous Chef] $129.
- We will never buy these again.
Abalone is very rare in Japan,
hence extreme price points,
but the texture is unbelievable.
So the abalone has two sides.
It has the deep side, and the skinny side on the top.
You actually come from the top side down.
That is how you release it, from up here.
Ride the shell down,
very careful you don't cut the liver.
Nice and clean.
There it is.
So what you're aiming for is no meat of any kind
on the shell and this is,
as you know, mother of pearl.
There's three main parts to the abalone.
You have here, the liver
and then you have the beard,
and then you have the abalone itself.
This is how we remove it.
Very carefully, come from here.
Let's get this beard.
Now on the liver side, this gets removed.
So this is the abalone liver, very exotic, quite delicious.
So the abalone liver, it's a very rich flavor
and it has that moss green,
probably because it eats so much kombu.
At George Blanc I had 24 chefs above me
and you had to work your way up
before you reached another level.
At Masa there was only three chefs
so each person was extremely pivotal in the kitchen.
When I was in these French kitchens,
of course I was the American and yes,
the French do make fun of us in many ways,
especially culinary-wise.
So I had to kind of really put my head down
and bust my ass.
And then in Japanese cuisine,
it was probably even more extreme
because I am the white guy, you know,
I don't speak the language, and I'm just, I'm not Asian
and all that stuff.
It's been 90 minutes steaming.
Come look.
You can see, if you wrap the plastic naturally,
the suction creates a natural sous vide.
This retains the flavor.
It's just packed in the concentrated liquid of the abalone
the sake and the kombu flavors.
Yawata maki is a very classic dish from outside of Kyoto
in which the burdock root
is wrapped in unagi and then grilled
and served with a tare.
One of my favorite dishes, very heartwarming
and just a beautiful combination.
The burdock smells like sweet soil.
Just by scrubbing it, I get this amazing aroma coming out.
The eel is a long sea food,
burdock is a long root vegetable.
One of the main differences of the Japanese kitchen
is the actual knife.
Now, the knife is holy in Japan, where in France,
the knife is important but it was not even close
to the importance.
The knife is paramount.
And you have this gorgeous texture.
Whoever came up this this,
it's such a beautiful combination, really.
We're gonna grill it right now.
Sushi?
Come on!
Way more interesting if you ask me.
Chinmi is defined as 'rare taste'.
Yeah, it's fermentation,
each chinmi is kind of treated differently.
Regionally, all over Japan, there are different delicacies
that is performed there.
Most chinmi could be started by using salt
and by pulling out moisture at the same time.
I thought chinmi was important to include in the menu
because it was a really important part of the culture
and something that's not really found here
or even in Japan.
If you look at one of the oldest chinmi called narezushi
which is a lacto-fermented fish in rice and salt
and cured for many years, that was a chinmi.
One of the things we're doing here is karasumi
which is the silver mullet that's cured in salt
and lightly smoked in cherry wood.
And that is cured for nine months.
This is called tofuyo.
What tofuyo is is a tofu that we make fresh here
and then we dry it out a little bit, in chunks.
After it's dried out in these chunks
then we mix it with beni koji,
which is a red koji, and awamori, and salt.
It takes us about four months to age and cure this one.
So there's a lot going on in here.
We're keeping track on the times
and the fermentation times of all these different products.
As there's times where they really peak
and then they start going down.
So this is the oldest thing I have in here.
This is a 12-year ginger.
This was made in Japan, when I used to live there
and then I brought it back on the plane.
It's been in my fridge.
This is all just Japan.
History of Japan.
The importance of having somebody like Masa early on
does a couple things to you.
It sets the standard for what's to come
after you were to leave somebody like him.
It teaches you passion, heart.
That's what I try to teach my guys every day.
This is a Japanese abalone, it's steamed in sake
with a liver sauce.
Having a good teacher is pretty much everything
because you really are a subject of your environment.
There's a reason why there's thousands of sushi chefs
and Masa's at a certain high level,
because he just has more passion.
He has more focus.
He is just more determined, period.
This is the yawata maki,
it's unagi wrapped in burdock root with a sancho tare.
Cooking's created a personality in that I could be
a little more detail-oriented than some of my friends
or wife might want me to be.
And having just extreme passion
because of these masters that I've worked with.
Here we have the moray eel which was grilled
and simmered nitsuke-style with fresh wasabi.
It is important to be a mindful person
because most people aren't.
And people notice that.
We have the Santa Barbara sea cucumber braised in sake.
I think I would want my legacy
to be a place that just serves honest,
true Japanese cuisine, and that's it.