{"id":68,"date":"2018-07-27T14:47:00","date_gmt":"2018-07-27T14:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gastromondiale.com\/2018-7-27-japan-journey-journal-part-2-restaurant-yanagiya-a-revered-country-cuisine-sketched-in-charcoal\/"},"modified":"2024-03-03T15:50:00","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T15:50:00","slug":"2018-7-27-japan-journey-journal-part-2-restaurant-yanagiya-a-revered-country-cuisine-sketched-in-charcoal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gastromondiale.com\/2018-7-27-japan-journey-journal-part-2-restaurant-yanagiya-a-revered-country-cuisine-sketched-in-charcoal\/","title":{"rendered":"Japan Journey Journal, Part Two: Restaurant Yanagiya, A Revered Country Cuisine Sketched In Charcoal"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

If you\u2019re gourmand enough, the food gods will smile upon you and leadeth you into temptation of any restaurant you wish to enter, which often means the ones you think you may never be able to enter. Most notable among these in the not-too-distant past are Jamin\u2013later to become Restaurant Robuchon\u2013in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Those old enough may remember the Parisian restaurants\u2019 boycotting of Americans at the time); Restaurant Girardet outside of Lausanne, especially after Morley Safer did a segment for \u201c60 Minutes\u201d about it more than 30 years ago; and more recently elBulli, Can Roca. Noma, Osteria Francescana and Alinea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Japan has more than its share of difficult-to-book restaurants, particularly some of the sushi and kaiseki ones in Tokyo. In planning my recent trip to Japan, a provincial restaurant named Yanagiya caught my eye because of its sky-high score on Tabelog, the Japanese restaurant-goer\u2019s rating site. That it also was the only one of its breed\u2013an\u00a0irori<\/em>\u00a0restaurant, an old, traditional but dying class of grilling-over-charcoal cuisine\u2013among the elite Tabelog restaurants really stirred my juices because it was also deep in the countryside\u2013in Gifu Prefecture, about 200 miles west of Tokyo and 40 miles northeast of Nagoya\u2013and I adore rustic restaurants in places I have never been to or otherwise wouldn\u2019t visit. But how to cop four places at Yanagiya, which is one of those \u201cYou had to have been here already\u201d or \u201cYou need to come with someone who already has\u201d restaurants? I put a fearless, confident spouse of a long-time Japanese friend who never takes no for an answer in charge of trying to get us this coveted reservation. Through a stroke of fortuitous timing, she reached Masashi Yamada, the fourth generation family member since the restaurant\u2019s founding in 1946, on Yanagiya\u2019s published phone number, one that he almost never answers. He told her that since he happened to pick up the phone, then it must have been a stroke of fate by which he felt a compulsion to reserve for her one of his eight\u00a0irori<\/em>\u00a0rooms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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After two hours and forty minutes on three trains starting out at Tokyo Station, we arrived at Mizunami Station where we and about 20 others squeezed into Yanagiya\u2019s mini-bus for the 20-minute drive through \u201c Le Japon Profond\u201d of streams, dense woods on hilly terrain, and metal-clad small buildings for undisclosed enterprises. Dutifully we and the rest of the diners waited outside the restaurant for ten minutes or so until management let us in past a display by the front door of five used bottles from the Domaine de la Roman\u00e9e-Conti.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A young woman took the four of us into our private, palindromic irori room that was two stories high and decorated above with two ayu or sweetfish wood sculptures. Running nearly the height of the room was an adjustable jizaikagi<\/em> for hanging cooking pots. The room felt intimate while also being well-suited to my tight hamstrings, thanks to the horigatatsu seating with which your legs hang down into a partially recessed floor. The sunken rectangular irori<\/em>, sandbox-like you could say, had wide wood borders to accommodate the food, and by the end of the meal they were covered with the detritus and disarray from the four of us feasting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When we first entered,\u00a0there was a neat pile of glowing charcoal. Yanagiya uses two kinds: One is\u00a0kurozumi<\/em>, a black charcoal made from a\u00a0kashi<\/em>, or poplar tree while the white charcoal\u00a0shiro-zumi<\/em>\u00a0is from a pressed ubamigashi tree, or an evergreen oak. The latter is a binchotan charcoal that creates a long-lasting fire, but both charcoals work to raise the temperature of the fire. Partially surrounding the pile of burning charcoal were the small\u00a0ayu<\/em>\u00a0or sweetfish, the designated fish of Gifu Prefecture. They were caught that morning in the next town and placed on bamboo skewers so that they appear to be swimming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What drives Yanagiya\u2019s cuisine is the same as in all great restaurants in Japan, most notably in kaiseki ones: the seasons, proximity of the produce and an obsession with freshness. These are the false rallying cries of so many restaurants of pretense where I come from, but here there is no monkeying around. Our venison from Hokkaido was the only product coming from beyond Gifu Prefecture. If one were to visit the restaurant in the fall, the offerings would be almost entirely different. As our visit was in the spring, the emphasis was on freshwater fish and mountain vegetables, the latter served boiled, as tempura prepared by Masashi\u2019s brother, in a soup, and mixed with rice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Top row: Fiddlehead fern, bracken, and mountain udo.\u00a0\u00a0Bottom row: Mustard greens; Ostrich ferns and pickled myoga (ginger)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Amago, a red-spotted masu salmon was cooked in front of us and served lightly-tempured with the mountain vegetable rice.\u00a0Unagi, the wild river eel, came with a traditional soy sauce, the juices of which the chef added to a bowl of rice.\u00a0Meat in various guises takes front and center at Yanagiya. While fall and winter are prime time with duck, wild boar, bear, venison and game birds among the offerings, we nonetheless were treated in springtime to venison and an uncommon duck. Generally, duck takes pride of place because of the house soy and ginger sauce. The elixir is as old as the restaurant itself. Because the cooking pot is never emptied and cleaned out,\u00a0the endless sauce may be an early, if not the most early, manifestation of molecular gastronomy since I figure that there must be molecules in the pot that have been there since the restaurant\u2019s founding 72 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The duck is a bit of a story in itself. It comes from an uncommon breed, Falicated Teal or Yoshigamo<\/em> in Japanese, and can only be hunted in April. Because it is also prized for its taste, the restaurant vacuum seals and then freezes it as to make it available past its hunting season.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thought the situation with my venison dish would also be an out-of-season aberration, having read that deer hunting season in Hokkaido ends in February. With an a posteriori phone call, Yamada-san said that since Japan has a deer situation similar to what deer fence owners in the States have, the Japanese government, much to the chagrin of animal rights groups, has declared open season in those areas that are overpopulated with deer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Stripping away the food itself, what you have is a repetoire somewhat akin to kaiseki, but without the structural precepts. The cuisine also doesn\u2019t fall into the realm of other cooking with fire Japanese cuisines such as shabu-shabu<\/em>, yakiniku<\/em>, or yakitori<\/em>, but overlaps with robatayaki which only rarely these days makes use of an irori<\/em>. The number of dishes and the size of the portions correspond to kaiseki without that cuisine\u2019s elements of classic, costly dinnerware and the beautiful arrangements of food on the plate, but with the variety and types of dishes such as sashimi, soup, mountain vegetables, grilled meat and fish,  rice dishes, and fruit for dessert, in our case a small piece of melon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yanagiya\u2019s cuisine is rustic to the core and honest as can be. Unless you have an aversion to something offered, there are seemingly no low points or duds there. It\u2019s not the \u201cepater la bourgeoisie\u201d cuisine that virtually monopolizes these rank-order \u201cBest\u201d lists or the convoluted concoctions you often find in Western cuisine. Here the food feels ageless, likely hardly different than when the restaurant began. A depth of flavor characterized nearly every dish, with delectable bee larvae cooked for six hours, the mountain vegetable soup, and the duck in the endless sauce being the most memorable for our group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cost for the omakase menu is around $125, which in Japan is relatively inexpensive for a restaurant so highly regarded. (The modest white Burgundy wines we had were fairly-priced as well). Other restaurants of renown cluster in the $250-300 range before drinks. This relative bargain accounts for the democratic composition of the clientele, much of it on a Sunday afternoon \u201den famille\u201d. Yet not even the occasional wailing of a little lad from an adjoining room could put a dent into our memorable visit to Yanagiya.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Japan has more than its share of difficult-to-book restaurants, particularly some of the sushi and kaiseki ones in Tokyo. In planning his recent trip to Japan, a provincial restaurant named Yanagiya caught Robert Brown\u2019s eye because of its sky-high score on Tabelog, the Japanese restaurant-goer\u2019s rating site. That it also was the only one of its breed\u2013an irori restaurant, an old, traditional but dying class of grilling-over-charcoal cuisine\u2013among the elite Tabelog restaurants really stirred his juices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":69,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[55,89],"ppma_author":[279],"authors":[{"term_id":279,"user_id":4,"is_guest":0,"slug":"robertbrown","display_name":"Robert Brown","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/www.gastromondiale.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/2_Gastromondiale_3_A4.jpg","url2x":"https:\/\/www.gastromondiale.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/2_Gastromondiale_3_A4.jpg"},"first_name":"Robert","last_name":"Brown","user_url":"","description":"

When I was born, I was destined to dine. When I was a child, my parents began collecting fine wine, ate the food in France of Fernand Point and Raymond Oliver, and often took my brother and me to New York from our house in Western Massachusetts to New York to eat in the best restaurants. When I started my rare books and posters business in 1970, I made (and still make) frequent trips to Europe with my wife where we traveled the length and breadth of France and Italy (and often Japan) to visit and revisit the great and interesting restaurants. While obtaining a Master\u2019s degree at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, I did my research in mass communication and mass and popular culture. It shaped my unique way in writing about and conceptualizing gastronomy.<\/p>\r\n<\/br>\r\n

I look at, and keep a constant eye on, how restaurant gastronomy in particular has evolved over the past 50 years in terms of innovation and change; the ways in which it is portrayed in mass and social media and their effects on dining preferences and tastes; the influence of new technology on creativity; the role that access to capital and restaurants as economic entities in influencing the state of dining; how people make decisions of where and how to spend their time and money on dining; the result of gastronomy moving from an elite to a mass phenomenon; and the myriad of real and conceptual matters that come into my mind on an almost-daily basis. This experience has made me vigorously represent the autonomy and well-being of my fellow diners, an aspect that is inexorably being diminished and thus taking its toll on integrity and connoisseurship. How all of this affects my gastronomic opinions and decision-making is apparent in what I have contributed, and will further contribute, to Gastromondiale.<\/p>"}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gastromondiale.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gastromondiale.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gastromondiale.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gastromondiale.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gastromondiale.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.gastromondiale.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7714,"href":"https:\/\/www.gastromondiale.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions\/7714"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gastromondiale.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gastromondiale.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gastromondiale.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gastromondiale.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gastromondiale.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}