One of the best Chinese restaurants in the world is in Tokyo

Kare rice: a simple and flavorful alternative to traditional rice for lunch or dinner and for celebrating and reliving in the modern era

kare rice is usually eaten for lunch, but also for celebrating and for current living. Seasoned lightly (or heavily), served alongside accouterments (or solo), the dish is wildly accessible. It can be prepared by the beginners or experienced chefs. It’s a meal that can exist in the background of your weekly revolutions, or as the marquee event of your evenings. Kare rice holds the imprints of a cook’s hands and influences, yielding delicious results regardless of whose stove it’s bubbling from.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/magazine/curry-rice-recipe.html

Sazenka, the three-Michelin-star Best-Chinese Restaurant in a Non-Cantonese-speaking City

The many ways it can be prepared, including vegetables and fruit, make Japanese curry popular, as noted by Harris Salat and Tadashi Ono in “Japanese Soul Cooking.” Curry can be used with oysters and scallops. Beef curry is simmered until the dish’s protein gives way to a silky, mouth-melting texture. You could cook a vegetarian curry, or a lamb curry, or ladle udon noodles into your curry bowl, which, as Masahiro Kasahara notes in “The Ultimate Japanese Noodles Cookbook,” is generally “served at a traditional washo Japanese (washoku) restaurant.” And as ever, there’s curry as a sort of fridge-clearing exercise, allowing stock and powder and time to bind odds and ends into something entirely beyond.

Inside a dimly lit dining room, chef Tomoya Kawada from Sazenka is drawing a diagram on a notepad as he explains his dreams for the future.

A Japanese chef has created the only three-Michelin-star Chinese restaurant in a non- Chinese-speaking city, and it is also the only one of its type outside of China. Not an easy task in the tightly guarded world of Chinese kitchens.

Set inside a former diplomat’s house in a quiet upscale residential district, Sazenka’s rise was swift. It was awarded two stars by the Michelin Guide in 2017 – the same year it opened. Another star was added in 2020 and it has held on to all three in the years since.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/sazenka-tokyo-best-chinese-restaurant/index.html

Sazenka: A childhood dream come true for a Japanese chef and the first restaurant to serve Chinese mesquite in Japan (by E.K. Kawada)

“Unfortunately, I’ll probably not feel satisfied with the results until I die,” says Kawada. “But we’re growing and we’re happy. We reach the top of the mountain, but something else begins. I think that it was fun when we were climbing.

The restaurant’s poetic name, Sazenka, is made up three words that mean tea, zen and Chinese. The restaurant’s 11-course feast, excluding small bites, pairing teas and desserts, feels more like a mindful kaiseki experience than a traditional Chinese banquet. The cost? $450 per person.

It begins with a bowl of somen noodles served in a mix of clear broth and tea oil in a blue-and-white porcelain stem cup, and ends with a sweet rice ball floating in a mild tea soup.

There were dishes called bang bang chicken and mapo tofu. I was enamored with their beauty. I could see the magnificent Chinese landscape in the food.

A childhood dream come true for Kawada is the menu he has created for Sazenka. His love for Chinese food took seed when he was just five years old, after his parents took him to a Chinese restaurant in Japan’s Tochigi prefecture.

At 18 years old, he got a job inside the kitchen of Azabu Choko, a now-closed Sichuanese restaurant in Tokyo. He worked there for a decade before switching to Japanese cuisine and training under chef Seiji Yamamoto of RyuGin for five years.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/sazenka-tokyo-best-chinese-restaurant/index.html

Wakon-Kansai: A New Approach to Chinese Cuisine Based on Sazenka’s Pheasant Suspice

The Sichuan Pepper Pigeon is prepared in a variety of ways, with both the thighs and breast skewered and grilled.

But out of all of Sazenka’s rich and expressive dishes, Kawada chooses the humblest of them all to represent his restaurant: the pheasant soup, inspired by Hong Kong’s wonton soup, featuring one floating pork dumpling in clear broth.

“Hong Kong’s premium stock is amazingly delicious. I always wondered what would happen if I tried to convey the taste of Japanese stock in Chinese cuisine.

To make the “simple soup,” as he calls it, the pheasant’s bones need to be pounded and soaked in water overnight. They are boiled in a high heat and the blood is taken out. The remaining bones are then boiled down for about four hours.

After resting for another day, the pheasant meat, Jinhua-cured ham, kelp, green onions, ginger, 15-year-old Shaoxing wine, salt and pepper will be added to the clear stock.

Slowly, the delicious comes. The deepness of the food in Japanese cuisine is a strength. The spirit of Japanese cuisine has a dish called pheasant soup, which makes you think about how much you liked that soup a few days later. This pheasant soup is the world of Japanese cuisine represented in one bowl.”

The soup is also the perfect illustration of Sazenka’s Wakon-Kansai philosophy, which has nothing to do with re-creating authentic Chinese dishes in Japan.

“I’d always thought that authentic cuisines from their original places are the best. I think a culture can only grow when it is on the move. So now, I think creating a cuisine, be it Sichuan or Japanese, that makes people feel comfortable is an outstanding achievement,” says Kawada.

It isn’t a fusion of Japanese and Chinese cuisine but rather a combination of two Chinese characters called cho and wa.

He points to Japanese food as being a cuisine that has achieved this aim by incorporating the culinary techniques and ingredients of various cultures from all over the world.

“I think the idea of Wakon-Kansai is wonderful. It shows how people strongly believed that Japanese and Chinese cultures should get along with each other more than 1,000 years ago, and that we should respect each other’s good points.”

“I hope Sazenka can be seen in this way as a symbol of world peace by getting along through food. That’s the idea I have when I am approaching my cooking.”