The Tokyo ef fect

YAMAMOTO

ord of mouth is very important in Tokyo, especially for a restaurant as tucked away as Yamamoto. It’s in the basement of a nondescript building near Yoyogi-Uehara station, with just eight seats at a bar overlooking an open kitchen and another six in a private dining room. The bar, made of hinoki, Japanese cypress, is the place to watch Seiji Yamamoto at work. He trained as a sushi chef before moving into kaiseki, Japan’s traditional cuisine featuring multiple courses, artful presentation and ultra seasonality. A meal might start with a bowl of raw seafood of varied textures – crunchy herring roe, warm sea urchin, creamy tuna with miso, chewy smoked razor clam – and progress through 10 courses in a classic kaiseki format. Fried lotus, shiitake, fugu (the infamous blowfish with some poisonous body parts) paired with gingko, dobin mushi (teapot soup) with intensely flavoured matsutake mushrooms, nodoguro (blackthroat sea perch) smoked over rice straw; rice cooked in a hotpot and