Steak - Mark Schatzker [80]
The best beef I ate at Fuku Buku that night was not A5. That honor goes to a cut it had never before occurred to me to eat: beef tongue. The tongue was, technically, A3 Gumma tongue, sliced across the grain and as mouth-poppingly luscious as the A5 meat. In one department, however, it had the A5 beat: flavor. It didn’t taste like liver or kidney or any other body part that fulfills some essential biological roll. It tasted like steak, just more so than the others.
I woke up the next day feeling like an eight-year-old on Christmas morning. The world teemed with wonder and possibility. My heart was filled with hope. It was A5 Kobe beef day. Chada-san had already made the reservation. That night, we would dine at a famous and expensive steak house called Seryna.
Chada-san, it turned out, was a fellow Kobe beef virgin. In an effort to boil off some of the mounting anticipation, we explored Tokyo. Ever since the otoro at Sushisay, our dialogue, which was constant, oscillated between two different subjects: Japanese beef and Japanese eccentricity. Chada-san insisted that Japan was no more peculiar than any other place. It sounded to him like I’d been fed exaggerated stories of some of the more extreme aspects of the culture. Chada-san himself, it must be said, seemed the embodiment of the habitual and conventional—a creature from the middle of the bell curve. He is not consumed by a passion for karaoke. He does not wear jeans sewn from Japanese hand-dyed denim, a single pair of which costs more than an Italian suit. He does not have a vast collection of sexually perverted Japanese cartoons known as hentai. (All of which is not to suggest Chada-san is boring, because he is not.) The Japanese, he pointed out, may produce beef that is exponentially more marbled and expensive than any beef in the world, but I was the one who flew halfway around that world to taste it.
He would have had me convinced, but Japan kept on serving up example after example of eccentricity taken to the point of fetish. Consider Sembikiya, a store that sells the most expensive fruit in the world, where every specimen is perfect and without blemish. I beheld pears, tangerines, and apples so flawless as to look almost fake. There were Shizuoka muskmelons for sale, a pair of which cost more than two nights at my hotel. The fruitcakes were more affordable—a single one was going for the same price as a designer cocktail dress. I bought the cheapest fruit in the store: a three-dollar mandarin, an exquisite specimen snatched off the digitally retouched cover of a food magazine. (Later, my hotel room became instantly misted with mandarin perfume as I punctured the peel. I placed the segments in my mouth, one after another, and they were a perfect balance of sweet and tart, but also explosively juicy.)
At a soba restaurant called Kikouchitei, I met a chef who had abandoned a safe and respectable office job so that he could study the art of making soba dough for three years and become a soba master. He grinds his soba—buckwheat, in English—on a custom-made granite millstone that sits behind glass as though it were some kind of shrine. The flour is mixed with water from Mount Fuji, which must be cold, because hot water makes the dough easier to roll, but it also ruins the taste. Not a grain of wheat flour is permitted, even though wheat flour makes the dough more pliable, because it, too, will alter the taste. The result is soba dough more fragile than antique butterfly