The Reach of a Chef (36 page)

In fact, Masa had long thought of opening in New York, but he couldn’t envision having two restaurants, and he didn’t want to leave Los Angeles. He’d had children and had been married. Now his kids were grown and he was divorced. Maybe it was the time to think about New York—the timing was right.

As part of the agreement for opening a restaurant in the Time Warner Center, Adam Block had asked for Keller to have the right to veto any potential restaurants in the building. In the beginning, Ken Himmel, CEO of Related Urban Development, had not foreseen a gathering of the country’s most elite chefs. Block said Related was considering a range of restaurants, including chains. Himmel agreed to Block’s request. Neither side thought much about this part of the agreement at the time. Related was more concerned about preventing Keller from opening a Bouchon or another new restaurant in Manhattan. But this condition turned out to be pivotal. Since Keller could veto any restaurant, he also now felt invested in the process. Certainly he didn’t want a chain restaurant next to his, and so it was up to him to find the chefs or restaurateurs he’d like in there.

Block said, “Who do you want?”

Keller said, “Masa.” Keller had eaten at Ginza Sushiko, and it had been one of the best meals of his life. (“A total involvement with the process and flavors,” Keller said, recalling what he’d liked so much. “You were engaged at every level.”)

Block went to see Masa. Masa had no business counsel or agent or anything, really—just his staff and his restaurant. Block would soon be representing Masa. Himmel flew to Los Angeles to eat at Ginza Sushiko, to talk with Masa and to show him the plans of the building.

Today Masa says, “I didn’t think long about it.”

With arguably the best American chef and the best Japanese sushi chef in the country in agreement to open restaurants next to each other in the Time Warner Center, restaurant space without street access suddenly seemed enticing. Vongerichten signed on. Block now felt that this was a good opportunity for his client Gray Kunz, who’d had four
New York Times
stars at Lespinasse, to make his return to Manhattan. Several people were considered for the fifth space, but ultimately Keller asked Charlie Trotter to join the group, and, after some grumbling about being the last asked to dance, Trotter, also represented by Block, said yes.

Of all these chefs, the most intriguing and curious was Masa Takayama. He would be one of only two chefs who would actually be at the restaurant full-time. Keller, Trotter, and Vongerichten all had multiple restaurants that would divide their time.
*
Masa would earn four stars by cut ting raw fish, serving it with rice, and charging more money than any restaurant in New York. Masa was a curiosity in the chef world.

“I am nothing,” he would say. And, “I am naked.” And, “I don’t do anything. Eighty percent of the work is just ordering the ingredients.” He means it, and it is true, if you include in that 80 percent, the
knowing
—knowing which ingredients to order and exactly what to do with them when they arrived. If so, then the other 20 percent comes from his hands.

Masa has no shortage of critics who can’t believe anyone has the gall to charge what was now, in truffle-and-blowfish season, $350 per person, to which a 20 percent gratuity was automatically added, for a total of $420 per person, before you even ordered bottled water, let alone dipped into the sake list.

His response can be seen as either equally arrogant or straightforward and logical: “If it’s too expensive, don’t come,” he says.

His business adviser, Block, says, “He is so uncaring about what the public thinks. He’s somebody who ignores the brand. He just knows, This is it, this is me, this is what I do.”

And so Masa is completely inflexible as far as what he will and will not do in terms of catering to the New York market, more so than any of the other Time Warner chefs. “But the good news,” Block says, “is that New Yorkers don’t have the same awareness of what he’s doing as they do with French food. So they’re gonna flock, because he’s got few seats, and because anyone who’s ever experienced Masa would agree it’s an amazing experience. It’s amazing, he’s amazing.”

Masayoshi Takayama was born on May 1, 1954, in Tochigi, Japan, an hour north of Tokyo. His family owned a fish shop and a catering business. Masa, the second of five children, worked at the shop while in high school. At eighteen, he says, he tried to go to the university, but didn’t last long. “Suddenly, I realized I was not interested,” he says, a couple of hours before service, seated at the $60,000 slab of
hinoki,
now completely covered with broken-down cardboard boxes. His accent is thick, his voice deep and rough, his cadence brusque. “To learn, to study, to be what? Businessman? I hated that.”

His older brother was working as an apprentice chef in Tokyo, and so, given that Masa didn’t have a better idea, he began working with his brother. His brother suggested he work in a sushi restaurant.
Why not?
Masa thought.

But the restaurant where he found work, a highly regarded 150-year-old restaurant called Ginza Sushi-ko, was run by a strict old man. Masa began by cleaning the bathroom and washing dishes—the way most apprentices started. Cleaning the bathroom was a serious job. When he moved into the kitchen, the work became only more difficult. “Very hard job,” Masa says. “Every day, every night, I tried to quit.” For two years, he wanted to quit. In his third year, he says, he started to learn things. And after five years he understood a new thing: He holds his hands up to me and says, “Here is my money.” He touches his chest, and says, “Here is my money.” But he knew, he says, “I had to polish myself, too. I worked hard, I studied.”

Finally, he thought that sushi chef might be the right job for him.

In addition to having become a sushi chef (in all it would take eight years of training), he also drew and painted. He drew many landscapes of his country, vistas filled with hills and trees, which was all that he saw. He’d heard that landscapes by Americans his age were of big, flat, wide-open spaces. He wanted to see this. A customer at Ginza Sushi-ko had a business residence in Los Angeles and urged Masa to use it. Masa did. Masa wanted to see the big, flat land, and so he was told to go to Las Vegas. He did and he saw the desert.

Masa moved to the United States for the landscape. And for golf. He loves golf, and it was cheaper to golf in L.A. than it was in Tokyo. In L.A., he worked for a few restaurants before opening a small restaurant of his own in a strip mall on Wilshire Boulevard, which he named after the Japanese restaurant where he trained.

When he opened, there was not much fine fresh fish. Where he had trained, they used only very good fish from the waters surrounding Japan. But in Los Angeles, he couldn’t get the same quality. So he told his fish purveyor, “Hey, buy from Japan.” The purveyor shook his head and said, “Too expensive.” Masa responded. “No,
I buy.
” He developed good customers, many of them Japanese businessmen who knew how good this fish was and were willing to pay for it. He didn’t need many, relatively speaking. He only had ten seats at the bar. And so he worked quietly and well, in relative obscurity, for several years.

“Then Ruth came,” he says.

He was in the car on the way to the golf course when he saw the small restaurant item, just two hundred words, in the
Los Angeles Times.

“When I first walked into this sushi bar,” wrote Ruth Reichl, the paper’s restaurant critic, “hidden in an unprepossessing strip mall in the mid–Wilshire District, I didn’t know I was about to order the most expensive meal I had ever eaten in Los Angeles.”

She pronounced the food sublime. “But what fish it turned out to be! Perfect slices of pink abalone. The richest tuna I’d ever tasted. An orange-and-purple clam that looked like a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe. Sea urchins that were bigger, fatter than any I’d ever encountered. The meal went on and on, ending with two giant strawberries. And a bill for $100.”

Wow!
he thought, amazed.
That my restaurant!

At the time, the early 1990s, the fanciest, most expensive sushi dinner you could buy was about forty dollars. At two and a half times this, Reichl said, Masa was a bargain. She would return to give the restaurant a full review, but the first piece seems to be what began Masa’s notoriety regarding his expensive fish and rice dinners.

Even Reichl had made the point that Masa had in a way created a dream—“to own a restaurant where he can feed perfect food made with the best ingredients money can buy to a few discerning diners”—one that no other chef in Los Angeles had been able to achieve quite that way.

“What made you think you could get away with it?” I asked.

“I didn’t care,” he said. “I just charged them…. Very small restaurant. People come. People get it, they come; people don’t get it, don’t come.

“Some people accumulate the money a little bit all year,” he continued, recalling a specific customer who would save and save for her annual meal. “Old woman. ‘Masa, I come here once a year.’ Herself. Not fancy.” The thought of this woman, who saved all year each year for one of his meals, here in the dimly lit, quiet restaurant, moves him, and I see he is about to cry. He rubs his eyes to stop himself. “That’s all we can do, you know. A hundred percent. That kind of face, when I see,
I love.
I’m
soooo
happy what I did. I spend a long time working. This is my best customer. Even no money. They understand. That’s why I can do.”

It is an indication of his refinement as a sushi chef, perhaps, that he will not eat sushi in New York. He has gotten sick twice from eating sushi in this sushi-adoring city, and that’s enough for him. There is no consistent training here, he says. In Japan, a chef must train for at least three years before he could even think of getting licensed, and then the chef takes his blowfish exam in order to serve this delicacy that can be fatal if not properly prepared. So Masa sticks to Korean restaurants and places that serve simple food. He can’t stand the kind of food served by his fellow four-stars. It’s confusing to him. It’s too salty. There’s too much butter. A dish that requires the work of five people doesn’t make sense.

Krispy Kremes, though, they’re another matter. “I
love
Krispy Kremes,” he says, almost woozy with lust. He brings them in himself on Saturday mornings.

Japanese cuisine has two main branches: the samurai branch, rustic, farmer cuisine; and the Zen branch, which is the branch Masa works. Both forms are about simplicity rather than complexity. He tries to teach his staff, “my kids,” he calls them, what this food is all about: “Very delicate,” he says. He wants them to appreciate the beauty of the cherry blossom. This is what his food is all about. If you can understand this, the attributes of a cherry blossom, then you can understand his food.

In L.A., Nick planned to prepare a special meal for his family at the restaurant during its day off. He wanted the table adorned with cherry blossoms. He slaved all day in preparation for this meal, which was to be a gift. As the hour of their arrival approached, he saw that the cherry blossoms were fading and becoming old-looking and brown. He had too much work and not enough time, but more important he had to find beautiful flowers; he drove into downtown Los Angeles from Rodeo Drive to make sure the cherry blossoms were right. “Very delicate.”

What Masa eats at his own restaurant is another example of what he appreciates—samurai food. As his staff leaned against counters in the kitchen eating family meal, Masa usually took his lunch on the cardboard-covered
hinoki,
where I joined him twice. On one day, we ate a broth flavored by the dark seaweed
kombu,
with soba noodles and a fried vegetable pancake floating on top. The other lunch was something I’d never had. A variety of fish tails, scraps from butchering, grilled or deep fired, and a bowl of marinated squid guts. The guts looked in my bowl like soupy pink spaghetti, and they had a tangy, fermented flavor. I’m pretty adventurous as far as what I’ll eat, but fish entrails, fermented or not, would not ordinarily be something I’d be excited about. Masa ate them and wanted to serve them to me, though, and so I looked forward to it. Everything to that point I’d tasted had been excellent at least, if not quite a bit beyond excellent. Every single thing I’d ever had there. The squid guts were no different—they tasted really good, the texture and flavor fascinating, like tasting a new form of blue cheese. This was the nature of food at Masa.

When a fish order arrived from Japan, everyone got quickly to work breaking down eels and flat fish and round fish and shrimp to get them properly prepped and stored. Masa took the octopus leg to work on. The three-foot-long appendage was speckled brown and fat as a baseball bat at its severed end. It was so fresh its big suckers on the pale underside were still contracting gently and the muscle still twitched. Masa skinned it quickly and expertly cut a couple of pieces and gave me one. It had a strange, sweet, sea flavor, but more, its texture was new and surprising as well, chewy on the outside and gelatinous on the inside. He would serve this as sashimi or sushi, sometimes lightly grilled for a little flavor and with a few drops of
sudachi.
Again, I’d tasted something that was wonderfully new.

After Masa ate, usually by himself, he would smoke a cigar in his dark restaurant and draw food and dishes and think about food. (“Think about food all day long—it’s fun!” he says.) He continues to enjoy drawing, as he has throughout his life. Many of the ceramic plates, dishes, and bowls he designed himself. In the spotlight above the bar, his bald head glowing, the blue smoke rising from a fat cigar, he looks like an Asian Mafia don perusing a stack of notes and betting slips, but he’s really thinking about new dishes and new ways to serve his food. The
shabu-shabu
dish is one such piece he designed: a dark brown roughly glazed orblike bowl on a small platform in which he serves piping hot
kombu
broth. Beside this is a small tray with a few thin slices of raw lobster and raw foie gras. You dip the lobster and foie in the broth using chopsticks, swish-swish for a few seconds to cook them, and then eat them. When I had this dish, I remember thinking that I never wanted to eat foie gras again any other way—what was the point?