Rice, Noodle, Fish by Matt Goulding Page A

we’re in a taxi heading west across Kyoto. Eventually we come to a river framed by a dark mass of mountains behind it. The taxi pulls up to a freestanding two-story wooden building, what looks like someone’s riverside residence.
    A family of four greets us at the door, bowing as we approach. Ken carries a gift from the Hyatt, little cakes and sweets from their pastry kitchen in impeccable packaging. “My favorite,” says the older man, as he bows to accept the gift and welcome his late-night visitors.
    As we step inside the house, I realize that it’s actually a restaurant, but it doesn’t look like any of the kaiseki places I’ve eaten in before: small and creaky, with a handful of tables and a long counter—more an izakaya than a sanctuary for quiet reflection. The room smells of grilled fish and sesame oil, but there are no customers to be found. I see two sets of chopsticks, two sake glasses, and two stalks of bamboo set at the bar. We take a seat, and the old man and his son join two other cooks behind the counter. Packed inside the bamboo is a sorbet made from shiso , an herb with aflavor somewhere between mint and basil, a bracing shotgun start. Ken gives a nod, and the procession begins.
    We start with a next-generation miso soup: Kyoto’s famous sweet white miso whisked with dashi made from lobster shells, with large chunks of tender claw meat and wilted spinach bobbing on the soup’s surface.
    The son takes a cube of topflight Wagyu off the grill, charred on the outside, rare in the center, and swaddles it with green onions and a scoop of melting sea urchin—a surf-and-turf to end all others.
    The father lays down a gorgeous ceramic plate with a poem painted on its surface. “From the sixteenth century,” he tells us, then goes about constructing the dish with his son, piece by piece: First, a chunk of tilefish wrapped around a grilled matsutake mushroom stem. Then a thick triangle of grilled mushroom cap, plus another grilled stem the size of a D-sized battery, topped with mushroom miso. A pickled ginger shoot, a few tender soybeans, and the crowning touch, the tilefish skin, separated from its body and fried into a rippled wave of crunch.
    The rice course arrives in a small bamboo steamer. The young chef works quickly. He slices curtains of tuna belly from a massive, fat-streaked block, dips it briefly in house-made soy sauce, then lays it on the rice. Over the top he spoons a sauce of seaweed and crushed sesame seeds just as the tuna fat begins to melt into the grains below.
    A round of tempura comes next: a harvest moon of creamy pumpkin, a gold nugget of blowfish capped with a translucent daikon sauce, and finally a soft, custardy chunk of salmon liver, intensely fatty with a bitter edge, a flavor that I’ve never tasted before.
    The last savory course comes in a large ice block carved into the shape of a bowl. Inside, a nest of soba noodles tinted green with powdered matcha floating in a dashi charged with citrus and topped with a false quail egg, thewhite fashioned from grated daikon. The chefs cheer as I lift the block to my lips.
    It happens fast, ten courses in just over an hour, and it unspools so quickly that there’s no time for talking or processing everything they serve us, but by the time we emerge from the restaurant under a bright bank of Kansai stars, I know that I’ve just eaten one of the great meals of my life.

    ç±³ 麺 魚

    If anyone could be expected to carry the torch for classic Kyoto cuisine, it’s Shunichi Matsuno. He was born in Gion, the ancient geisha district of Kyoto and the spiritual center of kaiseki. His dad ran a private teahouse, one of the most exclusive institutions in a city built on exclusive institutions. Down the street, one aunt owned a famous soba shop and another a grilled eel restaurant, two sturdy pillars of kyo-ryori .
    And yet, when he graduated from university, Shunichi wanted to be a