The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [122]
August 1991
Kyoto Cuisine
Standing on the corner of Takakura-dori and Shijo-dori, waiting for the light to change, I knew that I could eat here forever.
I was in downtown Kyoto, currently my favorite city in the entire world, “home of the Japanese spirit,” as someone has described it, capital of Japan for eleven centuries, birthplace of its traditional arts, crafts, and literature, and, more important than any of these, the source of its most refined, restrained, and elegant cuisine. Only my friends in nearby Osaka think that their food is better.
With just a few hours left in Japan, I headed toward the Takashimaya and Daimaru department stores, which I had first visited within minutes of arriving in Kyoto. Throughout Japan, the great department stores devote their entire basements to displays of food that rival the great food halls of Europe. There are exquisitely wrapped Japanese sweets and brand-name European chocolates; Chinese takeout and groceries from Milan; Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee for fifty dollars a pound and melons that fetch seventy-five dollars each; delicacies and delicatessen from Munich. Daimaru’s pride is a café and bakery run by Paul Bocuse, complete with plastic models of French breakfasts and a TV screen showing live bread bakers laboring somewhere in the bowels of the store.
But I was tired of grazing, and I had lost interest in most Western food, a potentially perilous condition in my line of work. I wondered how I would eat when I returned home. Would anything satisfy me but three meals a day of Kyo-ryori, “Kyoto cuisine”? And I blamed it all on Mr. Shizuo Tsuji and Mr. Nagata’s bowl of soup.
So I walked two blocks to say goodbye to Nishikikoji. This medieval market street is a quarter mile long, roofed over with red, green, and yellow awnings, and lined with 141 specialized shops selling raw and cooked foods, seaweed and rice and tofu of every description, fresh-roasted tea, sashimi knives, whiskey, pickles, and more fish than in an average-sized ocean—a hundred species in cases and tanks, pickled, dried, and salted fish in barrels and trays, fish being grilled over charcoal, fried as tempura, or cut into sushi. In the early morning, restaurant chefs collect their raw materials at Nishiki; in the afternoon, housewives and grandmothers elbow you aside as they assemble their dinners.
For two weeks before arriving in Kyoto, my wife and I had toured the southern half of Japan on a luxury cruise ship, from Okinawa to the island of Kyushu and then through the Inland Sea from Hiroshima to Osaka. In exchange for our passage, my wife was obliged to deliver six lectures on Japanese art and pretend that the food aboard ship was nearly edible. My job was to play the grumbling spouse, a role so foreign to my nature that an entire hour passed before I got fully into it. My sea change was helped along by the appearance of an unexpected typhoon in the East China Sea, which for several days tossed our ship about as if it were a tiny morsel of tempura in a cauldron of boiling oil. But when the typhoon had moved on, we left the ship whenever its throbbing engines mercifully stopped, and with an adventurous little band of fellow passengers sampled the regional cooking of Japan.
Our constant companion was Gateway to Japan by June Kinoshita and Nicholas Palevsky (Kodansha, 1990), an amazingly comprehensive guide to the history, culture, shopping, sights, food, and lodgings of this country. The writing is compact and witty, and the authors have included everything you need to know, from transit diagrams to an annotated list of Tokyo’s sex parlors, ranked “in order of difficulty.” Gateway is not simply the best guidebook to Japan—it is the best single guide to any country I’ve ever visited. And the restaurant suggestions we followed—mainly in provincial cities where we lacked personal recommendations—were highly rewarding.
I had prepared for Japan by reading Japanese