DINING OUT: RESTAURANT REVIEW
Modern Japanese, sushi-free
JOANNE KATES
May 5, 2007
Kaiseki-Sakura
556 Church St., Toronto. 416-923-1010. Dinner for two with saketinis and tip, $160 to $300.
Much as I adore sushi, if I had to review another sushi restaurant, I'd gag. It's like still wanting to be in love with someone, but the thrill is gone. It's just a matter of time until you have to stop lying to yourself about it.
I would still make a special journey for impeccable sushi. But the soul of sushi has been compromised, its heart torn out, by restaurants that adulterate it. Great hunks of farm-raised salmon, cooked shrimp, cheap tuna and soggy nori are not what the sushi chefs of Japan sweat five years in training to produce. Most of the sushi we get in Toronto is like that. Unfortunately, cooked Japanese food has also been compromised by its popularity, to the point where diners think Japanese food is all tempura and teriyaki.
Japanese food is one of the world's most refined and complex cuisines, acutely sensitive to seasonal changes, and full of symbolism and metaphor. Rarely do we see this here. Kaiseki-Sakura is the antidote. Chef Daisuke Izutsu was chef to the Japanese consul-general here for five years and then worked for a year under Marc Thuet at his bistro.
His restaurant, which opened last fall, does not serve sushi. He specializes in kaiseki - tasting menus that grew out of the tiny and elaborate dishes that were served as part of traditional Buddhist tea ceremonies. If one person orders a tasting menu, everyone else at the table must do so to safeguard the rhythm of the meal. The five-course tasting menu is $60, six courses are $80 and seven courses cost $100. One can also order sake pairings.
Our eight-course dinner begins with tiny rolls of deboned quail topped with "sea foie gras" (a.k.a. monkfish liver, a very fine stand-in), soy and miso-soaked mushrooms and tofu, with a side of mini water chestnut chips. Its saketini pairing, riffing on Japan's rising sun flag, is a sunrise sake: Maraschino cherry in sake, peach and guava liqueur, tonic water and grenadine syrup.
Next comes bonito (dried fish) broth with small cubes of house-made tofu (really a divine light custard based on kudzu starch pureed with sesame and cream cheese). Atop the tofu are shrimp-scented noodles, small white cylinders of mountain asparagus, fresh young bamboo shoots, and a single dried cherry blossom, all harbingers of spring in Japan.
Next comes an edible garden, a riot of colour, built on sashimi of amberjack, and grouper rolled in rice cracker crumbs. There are pale green shavings of cucumber, corkscrew curls of raw red and yellow beets, green and red shiso leaves, and daikon pureed with bright red chilies. The server gives us a small grater and a piece of green wasabi root to spike the soy. Fresh wasabi is a revelation, not the merely hot, but the hot, sweet and cool at the same time. With the sashimi comes liquid homage to spring: a cocktail of finely chopped cucumber with sake, lemon juice and sugar.
Then we receive a small lobster shell holding two lobster dumplings coated in egg yolk and topped with tiny tempura shreds of burdock root, white sweet potato and fragrant shiso leaves. Beside it sits lotus root that has been shaved into petals assembled to mimic a cherry blossom and dipped in seasoned tofu paste - like a tree covered in white spring blossoms. And then a small piece of salmon that has been grilled and afterward steamed in dashi (Japanese fish stock) for moisture, with a water chestnut carved into cherry blossom shape. Drink pairing is Japanese barley liquor.
Chef Izutsu composes each plate like a miniature symphony, loyal to art, mixing and matching media and cultures. As in the next course, his "bread box" is a tiny cube of white bread is topped with uni, but it has been hollowed out and filled with impossibly small diced apple and zucchini. Beside this is terrine of mackerel and potato, topped with deboned quail. There is also bamboo shoot cooked in miso and soy and plastered in a bright green (fragrant) leaf that our server cannot name.
Tiny perfect cocktails keep coming: The server proffers a fresh yuzu (kissin' cousin to sour tangerine) with an old-fashioned Japanese grater and wooden brush. He grates the yuzu and brushes it into a saketini made of yuzu juice with sugar and sake. Then he warns us that the black rock he has just delivered is hot. We are to cook slices of duck breast on the rock and then wrap them round mizuna leaves and dip it all into white sesame or ponzu sauce. Yum. Libation with this is Zen, a pale green ephemera, like a spring shoot in the garden: green tea liqueur with lime juice, sake and tonic water, its martini glass rimmed in sugared green tea powder.
Then comes a little lake of delicious, slightly citric, turnip puree, with a miniature island of steamed black cod topped with salmon roe. With it: cold sake served in an etched shot glass inside a wooden box.
Next is beef tongue boiled in miso sauce, the meat an astonishment of juicy tenderness, with a hunk of Thuet baguette beside it to sop up the sauce. And after that chazuke. Traditionally this is tea or dashi (Japanese soup stock) poured on cooked rice. Modernity gives us deep-fried eel risotto topped with fresh wasabi and chopped shiso leaf, sitting in a moat of shredded nori. We're given a tiny teapot of dashi to pour on, which creates quietly wonderful flavours.
Dessert is green tea mousse and Jell-O, with meringue filled with red beans and whipped cream. Despite having eaten more foods than the average person sees in a week, we are pleasantly sated, our senses stimulated. This is Zen and the art of fine dining.