With 'shun' cuisine at the fore, ex-Kashiwaya head chef Teruhiko Nagamoto's new venture is a vessel for Japanese history and tradition through hyper-seasonal cooking—done in his own way
For all the rarefied, hyper-seasonal ingredients on show throughout a meal at newly opened kappo-style restaurant Nagamoto—from buttery shirako (cod fish milt) to Miyazaki wagyu and Yamaguchi abalone the size of a man’s fist—the most laboured-over course, that in any other restaurant would be a bridging dish to rest the palate, is a simple dashi stock. Yet in the open, spotlit kitchen, chef-founder Teruhiko Nagamoto treats the simple combination of kombu and katsuobushi boiled in water with a reverence that a Chinese chef might otherwise afford to a bowl of Buddha Jumps Over The Wall, first preparing the kombu stock and katsuobushi stock separately for the guest to compare the flavours, then marrying them together with a steamed fish cake laden with Matsuba crab, baby turnip and citrus peel.
Read more: Nagamoto, a Kyoto-Style Kappo Restaurant, to Open on Central's On Lan Street
It’s a telling example of Nagamoto’s favourite maxim: “shimpuru izu besto!” That the Kyoto native has arrived at this conclusion after nearly 30 years in the culinary trade, a significant portion of which was spent at three-Michelin-starred Kashiwaya in Osaka and its two-Michelin-starred Hong Kong outpost, is almost prototypically Japanese. Indeed, where Chinese cuisine adds flavour to ingredients through sauces, marinades and the like, haute Japanese cuisine strips back each dish to the purity of the produce, and by association, the essence of the four seasons.