Rice, Noodle, Fish by Matt Goulding Page B

salaryman—a wage warrior far away from the smoke and steam of the kitchen. But the cooking gene was strong in Shunichi, and when the business suit began to chafe, he decided to continue the family legacy, albeit with his own restaurant safely removed from the rest of the Matsuno clan.
    â€œThe Gion was filled with drunk people treating women badly. Lots of prostitution. I knew I needed to get away from the center of Kyoto.” So he came to Arashiyama, six miles due west, and bought a house along the Oi River with a sweeping view of the area’s guidebook beauty.
    â€œBeing next to the river and the mountains, we hear the water from the kitchen, we see the leaves change from our window.”
    Tempura Matsu was a true tempura restaurant for only three years. The fry business was slow, so Shunichi began to experiment with other dishes to serve alongside the tempura. It was those dishes that customers loved and came back for. Gradually the menugrew in scope and ambition, incorporating the structure of traditional kaiseki but without being bound to its strict tenets.
    He ran the restaurant with his wife, Toyomi, and when his daughter, Mariko, and his son, Toshio, were born, as is tradition in Japan, they eventually became a part of the business.
    I learn all this one morning in the back of Shunichi’s station wagon on the way to Kyoto’s central market. Toshio is riding shotgun, arguing with his dad over the quickest backstreets to take through the city. It’s been nine months since the midnight meal with Ken at the Matsu counter, and barely a day has passed when I haven’t thought about that crunchy tilefish skin, that miso lobster, that icy soba finale. After nearly a dozen kaiseki meals and a world of ambivalence, I felt like I finally had a breakthrough, something unequivocally worthy of the towering fame of Kyoto’s cuisine, and I needed to know—and taste—more.
    The benchmark for innovation in Western cuisine is high these days. Ever since Ferran and Albert Adrià of Spain’s El Bulli blew the doors off the traditional French model of dining that dominated high-end restaurants for decades, unleashing on the world a palette of foams, gels, powders, and spheres to paint with, the modern kitchen has become the seat of a creative arms race. Centrifuges and thermal circulators share counter space with mortars and pestles, young chefs use liquid nitrogen like old chefs use freezers, and restaurants collaborate with physicists, chemists, even perfumists, in the search for the next big discovery. Ambition announces itself with a megaphone at these places, above all on the plate, where a tableau of strange tastes and textures paint precious—and sometimes delicious—pictures.
    But in Japan, creativity takes a back seat to tradition. Chefs remain more dedicated to perfecting the old than uncovering the new. Here innovation means adding a few extra grams of katsuobushi to your dashi, buying your tuna on Tuesday and serving it on Thursday, driving to the mountain to get your water. By this measure, what I tasted at Tempura Matsu was radical, if not downright heretical.

    Shunichi and Toshio Matsuno, in the kitchen at Tempura Matsu
    (Michael Magers, lead photographer)
    Most visitors to Kyoto will wind up in the Nishiki Market, the spellbinding sprawl of pickle purveyors, tofu artisans, and prepared-food specialists that runs horizontally through five blocks of downtown. But Kyoto’s legions of chefs do most of their shopping at the less beautiful but more functional wholesale market, a cavernous collection of bulk seafood, meat, and vegetable dealers. As with most of Japan’s commercial markets, you need a special ID just to survey the goods.
    The menu at Tempura Matsu is a constantly evolving animal, with dishes rotating on and off daily, if not hourly. Every night after service, Toshio and Shunichi draw up the next day’s menu, but final decisions aren’t made