Judges assess progress — and potential

While it is true that regional restaurants will often be difficult to access, that is all the more reason to cherish the scenery you encounter on the way there and back. Whether it is coming across a butterbur sprout in the snow, or just feeling the season with all your senses, the journey constitutes a delight in itself that city restaurants simply cannot offer. And of course it makes the joy of actually eating the food that much stronger.

Fortunately, in the last 15 years or so, there has been a renaissance in food that has greatly refined the offerings of regional Japan, with techniques from all manner of genres adopted. But this didn’t happen overnight. The concept of gastronomy as an art form, which is considered obvious in France, was finally accepted in Japan, and as a result cooks and producers spontaneously started pursuing better products based on their own local histories and climates.

It’s wonderful to be able to tell people about this change through Destination Restaurants. You can’t advance food culture just by talking about your own personal taste. For example, take a regional chef like Ishikawa, who is a graduate of our Tsuji Culinary Institute. With his L’Atelier de Noto, the chefs and the customers there will be thinking about questions like: Why this region? Why these ingredients? Why this dish? What kind of philosophy is behind it? True gastronomic tourism is possible only when both cook and eater are thinking about these things. That’s how you get the authenticity of the region, and how you establish the ideal place for the chef to show off their skills. It’s still early days right now, but there’s potential here to sell Japan’s delights to the world.

Iwas still out there eating two days before the selection meeting. Before COVID-19, I would spend five months of the year in Hawaii, two months in Asia and Europe, and the rest in Tokyo and other places in Japan, but since being involved in the first Destination Restaurants last year, I’ve had a strong desire to learn more about Japan.

I spent half of the past year in Tokyo and half in regional areas, and once again I was able to experience the richness and depth of Japanese food culture. For example, I learned that the fermentation technique used at Satoyama Jujo in Niigata was born from traditional techniques to preserve food in remote villages that became snowed-in during winters. So today’s chefs are learning the techniques and ingredients that were born from these local climatic necessities and reinventing them in contemporary dishes. I also learned that fermentation and preservation methods differ between extremely cold and milder regions. You don’t realize that sort of thing unless you actually visit these places.

So it is not just that the restaurants are tasty, it’s that they serve to satisfy our curiosity. That is how they are able to convey food culture. It’s true that with many regional restaurants there will be drawbacks, like they are difficult to reach by public transportation, or they have a poor selection of alcohol, or there are no good accommodations nearby. And yet restaurants like Dewaya in Yamagata Prefecture give you a sense of experiencing their evolution firsthand, and that’s what makes them attractive. You just know that they are going to get better and better.

In the period of one year, I visited 700 restaurants — 300 of them were overseas, 200 in Tokyo and 200 in regional Japan — and I can tell that nowadays, social media makes it easier to disseminate information, so even if a restaurant is in a remote location, if it is good then someone will post about it and potential diners will learn about it immediately.

This is good news for people running restaurants in the regions, given that without money-paying guests a restaurant simply cannot sustain itself. Partly because of this, the number of ambitious regional projects by young chefs has increased in recent years, such as Akai in Hiroshima. Likewise restaurants like Don Bravo in Chofu, a city that is located in Tokyo but outside the 23 wards, and as such is not that easy to get to and is generally excluded from city restaurant guides.

In Destination Restaurants, I am also keen to shed light on restaurants in the suburbs of Tokyo (including Chiba, Saitama and Kanagawa prefectures), which are often overlooked because they are neither in the city center nor in regional areas. Too close to visit by shinkansen but far by regular train, they are at a disadvantage. Then there are restaurants like Kamakura Kitajima. The city of Kamakura is known as a tourist destination, but not really for its restaurants, and now a restaurant comes along that in the space of one year has proved so popular it is booked out three months in advance. With a single restaurant attracting people like that, it is bound to contribute to invigorating the economy.