As much as David Kinch, the chef and owner of the restaurant Manresa in Los Gatos, Calif., uses local ingredients like abalone and nasturtium petals in his kitchen and features them in his new cookbook, "Manresa: An Edible Reflection," it would be misleading to say the Bay Area is his only muse.
Tokyo, a city Mr. Kinch first visited in 1989 and returns to regularly, is, he said, "the greatest eating city in the world."
"It's pretty hard to top the quality of food and the amount of restaurants and the diversity of styles that goes on there," he said.
"It's really hard to find bad food there," he added.
Below are edited excerpts from a conversation with Mr. Kinch on eating in Tokyo.
Q. Is there a restaurant in Tokyo that you always visit?
A. There are three. The first one is a sushi bar, and it's not Jiro. It's called Sushi Mizutani after the chef, Hachiro Mizutani. I've been there half a dozen times now, and it's so good, the quality strikes such a chord with me, that I find myself thinking about it all the time. At a sushi bar, everything is naked — you have no place to hide. What you're eating is basically rice and fish, and the fish is a complement, a companion to the rice.
Really? Not the other way around?
No, sushi is about the rice. The fish — I don't want to say it's secondary — but if you're getting the best of the best fish, how you define your style is by what kind of rice you use, how you prepare it, shape it. Is it salty? Is it not too sweet? It can have a strong vinegar taste. It could be warmer. You work very hard at defining the style of the rice and choose your preference, and for me it's Mizutani. His rice is perfect.
What are the other two restaurants that you always return to?
Ginza Kojyu. It's a great omakase restaurant, meaning it's one menu only — traditional and modern at the same time. The chef, Toru Okuda, is a great friend, and it's a restaurant that really resonates with me. It's a few courses, really well chosen, and what strikes you is how beautiful everything looks and the quality of the ingredients. His beef courses are really amazing; they're usually paired with a fish, almost like a surf and turf. He also does seasonal dishes with young spring vegetables, like little green shoots, harvested when they're poking out of the snow. Really stunning.
The third is Ishikawa. The food is a lot lighter, more modern in style than Kojyu, and the hospitality is pretty amazing. They only serve one menu, but I've had friends who have gone and had such a great meal they go back a couple of nights later, and the restaurant, even though it has the same menu in place, makes a completely different menu for just these people. The effort to do that is extraordinary. I'm not saying you should expect that if you go twice — but that's the lengths they've been known to go to.
Any favorite casual spots or markets?
The outer market at Tsukiji. When everybody thinks of Tsukiji, they think of the fish market and auction, but they also have what's called the outer market where there are cookbook stores, small little restaurants, a vegetable market, meat shops, condiment stores, plateware shops. You could spend all day there. But it's moving soon, which has been a big deal.
Also, there's a neighborhood called Ueno, this loud, noisy area underneath railroad tracks, which is really great. A lot of cheap, fun places to eat ramen and soba, little pubs — izakayas — and fun stores. There's a street that's famous among chefs called Kappabashi Dori where you can buy all things culinary — the plastic food displayed in windows to the finest knives. I'm constantly bringing things back home.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 8, 2013
An earlier version of this article described incorrectly one of the local ingredients David Kinch uses in his kitchen and features in a cookbook. He uses the farmed variety of abalone — not wild abalone, which cannot be legally sold or served in his area of the state.
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