Steak - Mark Schatzker [83]
A major perk of working at Seryna, it seemed to me, was access to all that A5 Kobe beef. I asked the manager how much of it he ate, expecting him to say something like “Twice a day. More on weekends.” With a straight face he said, “I prefer fish.”
Among those in Tokyo who do not prefer fish, Seryna is famous for pioneering a form of cookery upon rocks originating from the sacred Buddhist town of Nikko, which are heated in a kiln for eight hours until they reach 300°C (almost 600°F), whereupon they are placed in front of a hungry diner, whose nose immediately begins running due to the intense heat. On such rocks, the cooking time of a steak can be measured in seconds.
Westerners don’t ordinarily go for hot-stone cuisine but prefer their steak teppanyaki style, that is, cooked on a hot flat metal grill right in front of customers by a chef. (In Japan, teppanyaki does not include the culinary acrobatics—slicing a lemon in midair or creating a “volcano” out of sliced onion that spews flame—for which it has become famous in America. Where teppanyaki is concerned, Americans are clearly weirder than Japanese.) Asians, however, generally prefer the hot-stone method. The Chinese kung fu superstar Jackie Chan came to Seryna to eat A5 Kobe beef cooked on a hot stone, which he enjoyed, according to the manager. But when Tom Cruise visits Seryna to eat A5 Kobe beef, he always chooses teppanyaki.
Chada-san and I were now escorted into to the womblike dining room. Behind the bar sat a large aquarium that looked like the cover of a fantasy novel. Inside it was a landscape of ancient undersea ruins with blue fish swimming around in circles. (The fish were fake, controlled by a mechanical arm.) Muzak emanated softly from hidden speakers.
A waitress in a kimono—young, demure, and beautiful—introduced herself and took my order: A5 Kobe beef strip loin. A short time later, she returned with a brown apron that she tied around my neck, her smooth fingernails and soft hands gently tickling my skin. Minutes later, she reappeared, this time with the rock. It was set inside a silver dish encased in a thick and ancient-looking wooden box that looked like a prop from a samurai movie. The rock looked generic, rounded and oval-shaped, perhaps eight inches in diameter, and it gave off a fantastic heat, more intense even than the Smithfield Pro-Cook or the gas-powered grill at Fuku Buku. I blew my nose. Chada-san and I moved a little farther down the table so as not to bake in its presence. The waitress returned with the steak, which was at most half an inch thick and pre-sliced into wedge-shaped strips. I considered putting one in my pocket and taking a direct flight to Lubbock, Texas, so I could flabbergast the marbling-obsessed meat science faculty at Texas Tech.
A Muzak version of John Lennon’s “Imagine”—arranged for flute—began wafting out of the ceiling as the waitress sprinkled Himalayan sea salt on my Kobe beef. Using two very long chopsticks, she daintily laid three slices across the rock, and they roared to an immediate sizzle. The air became thick with the aroma of grilled beef, and little droplets of melted fat began sliding down the side of the stone like rainwater trickling on a window during a downpour. In less than a minute, the first side was browned. The second side went even faster. The stone was smoking when I bit into my first-ever piece of Kobe beef, which reached the sensory peak of richness. The flavor was beefy, sweet, and nutty, but flavor seemed like almost an afterthought to the texture, which was smoother than hot buttered silk. Chada-san took a bite and said, “Very nice. Delicious.” He closed his eyes, chewed more, and said, his eyes still closed, “Artistic.”
We ate our way through the three little strips of steak, and my note-pad, camera, and digital recorder became spattered with fat. The stone had lost none of its intensity, and as the flute gave way to saxophone, the tempo of “Imagine” started to build. The waitress was onto the last two