Thoughts on Flights II - What is Haute Cuisine?

23 May 2009. VS 238. LHR-HKG

I've just started my first in-flight meal on this thirteen-hour flight. If only plane food actually is presented as it sounds – alas, not in the twenty-first century. The 'menus' could look and sound terribly fancy, and yet each and every item on the tray just manages to contain that bit of awkwardness that you do wish they'd given you something quite plain but more pleasing than, say, yellow-brown green beans boiled two days ago and now 'dressed up'. As if the prospect of being bound to the half-foot space for the next half-day isn't depressing enough already, I suddenly realise that I've made one of the worst mistakes you can make when having an economy-class in-flight meal - I've chosen a programme called 'Yi-Pin Ryoyi' on the V! Japan channel on the entertainment system (sure, the food sucks but I still stick to Mr Branson's airline where I can, mostly for their entertainment programmes).

Yi-pin ryoyi means, literally, 'first-class cooking'. Any producer of the equivalent of such programme in the English-speaking world would have named it 'Haute Cuisine' (with just enough English accent in the pronunciation to ensure the snootiness of it). And what would this be in the heart of Tokyo, which is consistently featured in the global chart of cities with the highest living costs? Since Japanese food (I mean the real deal – perish any thoughts of Wagamama!) worldwide is already synonymous with freshness, exquisiteness, tastiness as well as nutritional values, you'd be excused for thinking, as I did, that it would be the Tokyo version of Gordon Ramsay/The Ivy/Nobu. But that couldn't be further from what's presented next.

Yu Café, located in the beautiful, historic neighbourhood of Ueno, is famed for its 'bi-hu shituro'. That's beef stew to you and me. And actually, that's the only dish they offer, day after day after day, all year long, . 'They' consist of a total staff number of two, a mother-and-son team. The mother, who must be in her fifties but has such impeccably beautiful skin common among Japanese women, looks like she could be in her late thirties. She brought up the son (now in his late twenties/early thirties?) all by herself, remarkably while remaining a career woman, working in publishing. A few years ago they opened up the café together in the front room of their own 75-year-old house, and since then it's become, if the crowd of lunchtime customers captured on screen is anything to go by, a real hit. They take us through their daily routine – the son takes their two dogs walking, picking up all the cooking ingredients (fresh beef, miscellaneous vegetables) he needs en route from local shops. Meanwhile mum cleans up the space and gets ready for cooking. The secret of the beef stew is in the stock apparently, and even though I didn't understand a thing being said, they clearly didn't give out the secret here. Each order of the stew is beautifully presented in a little stone pot, topped with freshly steamed vegetables, and served with bread and salad. It may sound utterly un-Japanese, yet the visual aspect of it – how you can tell the beef would be tender and juicy and delicious just by looking at it – already beats a lot of dishes that sound much more pretentious and are much less tempting. The customers, who include local businessmen as well as tourists, can't get enough of it. One of them is a heavily-accented, middle-aged man-in-suit from Osaka, who could have come all the way on the bullet train for a bowl of the stew for all I know. And there's just something intrinsically satisfying about the fact that everyone's eating exactly the same thing and in agreement with each other on their high opinion of the food. If only real socialism could be achieved thus! Oh, and the cost of the set? A total of 1000 yen (approximately US$10). No wonder the cute female presenter keeps widening her big eyes, with non-stop exclamations of 'Soo nan desu-ka!' (Is that so!)

Next up is a Ten-don place, in the heart of Ginza, where real estate prices rank among the highest in the world. Ten-don is short for 'tempura-don', don being the generic dish of bowl-of-rice with topping, which is just tempura in this establishment. And yes, you've guessed it – they serve nothing else but this signature dish, and if your tempura encounters so far have mainly/only involved greasy batters with a barely recognisable soggy centre, just watching this would make you a complete tempura convert (well, as well as making you feel so awful, about not being able to actually have it right here and now, that it hurts – trust me). Again – one can only accept that the Japanese haute cuisine is routinely borne out of such circumstances – it's a family business through-and-through, in this case a husband-and-wife team in their fifties. The words 'forty-one years' appears in the subtitle when he describes the history of the restaurant, and I guess it's been a family business for at least a couple of generations. The whole process of tempura being created here is captivating to watch from start to finish. First he selects three huge, plump shrimps whose freshness manifests itself abundantly. They're dipped in a special batter before being fried in sesame oil at 180C – the chef here does a hand gesture to stress the importance of the precision of this temperature. There's some magic working here, for when they're lifted from the fryer a couple of minutes later there's no residue oil dripping at all, almost a physical impossibility. Next up is assorted vegetables – again, unlike the bog-standard line-up of carrots and sweet potatoes we tend to get, they use carefully selected asparagus, aubergine and other indigenous Japanese varieties. In the meantime, the other half of the don – the rice base – is being made by the Madame of the house. Whereas usually this would be just plain steamed rice, not so at an Yipin-ryori restaurant! She lightly fries sliced onion with beaten eggs, using a minimal dollop of oil, which acts as a sub-topping, the scrumptious, soft layer between rice and the crown jewels of tempura. The whole appetising bowl is then served with miso soup and pickles. At this point the lovely presenter reveals yet another house secret – the chef conjures up a whole line of miso pastes from under the counter, each originating from a Japanese prefecture, from which he chooses and serves each customer depending on their accent – 'so that they can have a taste of home' (or at least that's what I think he said). And the pretty lady – if she weren't obviously so nice I'd have really, really hated her by now for the privilege of devouring all this – now lightly sprinkles green tea salt – I couldn't have made this up if I tried – all over the tempura, then everything is devoured, in a matter of seconds, with a lot of 'umms' and 'ahhhs' (well, their Japanese equivalent). Again, local workers and visitors alike don't seem able to get enough of this place, and the sight of impeccably-besuited bankers patiently waiting in line in this little side alleyway amidst all the surrounding Ginza grandeur is something to behold. Yet the most memorable frame is the humble smile of the proprietor/chef and his simple motto: 'Beautiful food makes you want to smile, I guess that's why I've enjoyed doing this for so long.' Oh, and the most important piece of information – the heft costly of all this 'ji-pin' (the ultimate food) as pronounced by our presenter? 1200 yen for the set, that's US$12. Those shrewd bankers sure know how to get the best value out of their hard-earned money.

If you think my enthusiasm about all this is completely disproportionate, and probably due to exceptionally bad accompanying meal thanks to Virgin Atlantic, think again. I didn't even understand what was being said on the programme 98% of the time, and just about managed to piece together all the practical information with the aid of the Japanese subtitles, some of which were in Chinese characters (as with all written Japanese). I'm simply struck – as I have in the past, time and again – by how differently the Japanese define 'high quality' as Westerners mostly do nowadays. Even in Tokyo, the most expensive city in the world, haute cuisine needn't cost the earth, quite the opposite in fact. The things they believe in, and celebrate as a people, are what make their food so unique. Sure, there are places all over the country where you can find thousand-pound-bottles of champagne, Phillip Starck interiors, set menus that can take a lengthy ritual to finish and cost a small mortgage to consume, and establishments where 'tipping' (although in the discreet Japanese manner) is a euphemism for 'be prepared to leave half of your savings account here'. But they choose not to show any of those exclusive and elusive options as their places of joy and pride, instead giving us a perfect and illuminating lesson of what haute cuisine means to them with these two little gems of examples. And for me, there is an upside to having this on the in-flight system after all: by the time I've watched this for the fourth time, Hong Kong is not that far away.