The Reach of a Chef (37 page)

Masa conceived of serving foie gras this way after a customer brought him from Scotland a fresh monkfish liver, which is a lot like the fattened duck liver. It was so fresh and good that he puzzled over how best to cook it. As delicately as possible, he thought. The
shabu
idea worked so well, it’s become a staple dish.

The next course will simply be the
kombu
broth, which now has been flavored by the lobster and has drops of gold fat from the foie gras floating on its surface. It’s beautiful to look at and delicious to eat, a work of great simplicity and efficiency. All hallmarks of Masa’s food.

The previous spring, I’d traveled to Baltimore to be part of a three-person writers’ panel at the annual International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) conference. Bourdain was also on this panel, and he made some tongue-in-cheek remarks about him and me touring as a kind of culinary Martin and Lewis—something that would be very bad for my health. It’s part of his evil nature that he is enormously charming in person and somehow convinces you that it’s not only OK but, in fact, a great opportunity to take up smoking again, and to stay out till dawn pounding beers with grizzled Vietnam vets who insist on buying the celebrity yet another round, the night before our eight
A.M
. panel discussion. Just when you’re certain the guy’s a deceptive scoundrel who cannot be trusted, is bad for your physical health and Midwestern integrity, he undoes you with an incredibly generous blurb for your cookbook.

So, early in the evening in Baltimore, well before I began to see double, he mentioned he was writing an article on Masa and had a rez in a couple weeks. He’d already been once but had been so seduced by the food that he had no idea what had happened; in fact, he’d become so enraptured by the experience that he had no notes whatsoever and thus could not write his story. So he was returning with our mutual friend Eric Ripert, arguably the most knowledgeable fish cook in the city.

I was by chance going to be in the city on that date, preparing to watch the reopening of Per Se. I begged to be able to join them. He said he’d see what he could do.

I truly wanted to be wary of Bourdain, but how, when it was he who first delivered me to the
hinoki
altar, and more: He picked up the tab for all three of us, which would be $1,300 (that’s without the three bottles of wine sent to us as a gift from a friend).

Eating at Masa was one of the most original and extraordinary dining experiences I’d had. It was second in power only to my experience at the French Laundry, which had been, because of its timing in my life, right up there with losing my virginity, if not actually divine in some small way.

That said, I believe Masa is the most exciting fine-dining experience in Manhattan, period. By far. Maybe in the world.

The room is peaceful and refined, and when you sit at the bar you cannot help but rub your palms over it, it feels so sensual—you’ve never felt wood like this before. Masa simply walks out (the night we were there, he wore a loose blue shirt and an apron over loose trousers, wood clogs), nods, and starts serving. He mixes some cucumber salad and serves it with crayfish and the meal is begun. Next comes the signature
toro
with caviar, served with rectangles of toast, followed by bonito sashimi wrapped in daikon radish, soft-shell crab tempura, the lobster-and-foie
shabu
dish. And then the sushi begins, served by hand, eaten by hand. Two couples were seated on either side of us. Masa fed them as well, assisted by Kei on his right and Nick on his left.

He uses a long, slender knife with a carved handle made from the horn of a water buffalo, a beautiful object in itself. Before service he has sharpened it on a ceramic stone using lots of water, and rubbing it back and forth hard as if he were scrubbing the stone. He then washes his hands and thoroughly scrubs his nails with a brush. His movements are clean and fine, the apotheosis of grace and craftsmanship. When he cut the
aji,
he left on a thin swath of silver-blue skin. The skin remaining on the board had an artful pattern cut out of it—even his garbage looked beautiful. He then folded the mackerel over a pillow of rice with some fresh wasabi. Mackerel is something I’ve always associated with cat food and was not something I thought you wanted to eat raw. But Bourdain beside me was already making low-moan ecstasy noises. Indeed, the fish was smooth and sweet and buttery. Mackerel? This was not the world I knew.

The sushi also included the saltwater and ocean eel called
anago,
a sushi roll packed with a massive mouthful of
o-toro,
the fattiest part of this fatty part of the tuna. (Masa’s tuna, the
toro
and the
akami,
the leaner part of the tuna, arrive frozen and are kept in a Thermo freezer, a serious piece of equipment Masa keeps at–87 degrees Fahrenheit.) We had grilled
toro
as well. A grilled shiitake, served on sushi rice like fish, whose texture ingeniously mirrored the fish. Sea urchin, a scallop that he tenderized by crosshatching it with his knife, sweet clam, calamari, shrimp, Kobe beef grilled so that when you bit into it, fat felt like it was pouring out of the meat. And it concluded with some sweet eel, freshwater
unagi
.

There was more to the genius I realized only after he asked if we would like something else. Greedily, I wanted to taste the
shima aji,
which had come early in the sushi service. It had been my favorite of the sushi courses. But when I tasted it at the end of the meal, it wasn’t the same, it had lost its shine somehow. Masa had known not only exactly how but also when to serve this fish. It was critical to submit absolutely to Masa.

Masa is at ease and casual at his station, talking every now and then or answering a question in his broken English or grunting like a parody of a Japanese wrestler. He joined us with a glass of each of the wines we drank. He was working, but he conveyed that he was enjoying the work.

Midway through the meal, Bourdain, in
o-toro
ecstasy, said, “Put a gun to my head and shoot me right now. I’d be fine with that. I’d die a happy man. You know that at this moment no one on earth is eating better than we are.”

And it was, I believed, actually true.

“Have you had enough?” he asked finally. We accepted that we had. He said, “Thank you very much.”

Reentering the mall after such otherworldly refinement jarred the senses. We made it to a relaxed hangout of Eric’s and talked about the meal, and it was interesting to hear what other chefs thought of this guy.

Ripert had been to Per Se the night before and had, before we’d begun our meal at Masa, exclaimed in a rapturous whisper, “I think Per Se might be the best restaurant in the world.” He’d had a good meal evidently, but what he had just experienced at Masa was unquestionably new.

“It is the antithesis of what Thomas is doing next door,” he said. “Thomas gives you extraordinary sophistication and luxury, and Masa, he has a piece of wood and some chopsticks and a bucket of steamed rice, some china he made himself.” Eric shook his head. “I think it’s genius.” Masa was a master, and the culture he was bringing to New York was extraordinary, Eric said.

Bourdain, too, remained reverential: “That’s what he does—he turns everything we do, everything we know, on its head. What he is saying is, You know nothing.”

Masa is very much in control, not just of the food but of the entire environment in his restaurant. Arriving guests are asked to turn off their cell phones. He doesn’t want to hear them or hear people talking on them. “That make me pissed off very much,” he says. He will actually get angry during service if it happens. “Hey,” he’ll say. “Shut up with telephone, otherwise I smash your telephone. Another person in the private room—‘Hey, what you do? Get out of here! Make your phone call outside.’” Usually people apologize, he says. “I want people to enjoy this environment, this world. No telephone, forget it. Like Disneyland, you step into a different world, see?”

Anything that cuts into this environment makes his performance more difficult. It is just that, a performance. Chef Benno had remarked on this more than the food. When Masa asked if he enjoyed the meal, he had replied, “It was a real inspiration to watch you.”

“It’s part of the show,” Masa says of his presence. “That’s why I can charge three-fifty. If sit in some private dining room, they just see the dish, I cannot charge three-fifty.”

“Everyday it’s a fight,” he says later. “If they like, I win; if they don’t like, I lose. If they don’t like, I get very pissed off.”

And this: “I want to see the people eat. Joy. I want hear them say, ‘Wow!’”

If Masa cannot make it into the restaurant, his assistant will call their reservations and cancel them all. “When I catch cold, I close the restaurant,” he says.

I asked how he stayed healthy and maintained the energy to cook and perform six days a week, often twice a day.

“Don’t eat too much!” he says, and then laughs his deep, long, exuberant laugh. “
HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa!
Go to sleep!
HaHaHaHa-HaHaHaHaHaHa!
”

Masa is easy and funny when he’s not working. When I was commenting on some of the dishes he served, he said, “Simple right?
HaHa-HaHaHa!
Thomas works
so hard.
” He makes an expression of mock pity. “I’m lazy!”

Every now and then he’ll compose a complex dish with multiple components. The current
fugu
dish is an example. Fugu, or blowfish, is in season in the fall. The liver of the wild blowfish can contain toxins that are lethal, and the entire fish must be carefully prepared by licensed chefs. The blowfish Masa uses are not wild but rather are grown in their environment in large pens and are not dangerous. The toxin, Masa explained, originates in the shellfish that blowfish eat. The pen they’re raised in keeps the shellfish out. But as they remain in their natural habitat, and are farmed seasonally, the penned blowfish have the same flavor as wild.

For the
fugu
dish, he serves the flesh as sushi, three different parts of its skin (each has a different texture), its intestine cleaned and cooked and stuffed with green onion, and a piece of its liver. Later in the meal he will serve chunks of the head deep-fried—Kei says, “It’s
so
good. It’s like fried chicken”—served with a ponzu-like vinaigrette.

With all those components and the heavily worked-over fish, I say, “That’s kind of like a Thomas dish.” He nods gravely and says, “I copied.”

Masa doesn’t use only Japanese ingredients. Many of the clams come from around here, the scallops too. And the ginkgo nuts come from a tree in Central Park. Masa smelled them during a walk. Their thick, soft shell has an intensely funky, unpleasant odor, but shelled, cooked, and skinned, the inner nut is delicious, sweet, and nutty tasting. He serves them as they are, the way you’d serve olives or cashews before the meal. I’d never had anything like them. His grill chef Ryan Becze goes out and gathers them from the park after lunch service.

Ginkgo nuts Masa knew from Japan, but the origins of any ingredient are less important than that they fit into a Japanese style. “It doesn’t matter, Western ingredients, Japanese ingredients,” he says, “only matter good ingredient—good stuff.” He will batter and deep-fry an entire golf ball–sized white truffle, wrap it in rice paper, and serve it as a single course.

And this is partly the reason for the high cost. Not only does he make abundant use of the very expensive ingredients common in pricey restaurants, such as foie, truffle, and caviar, almost all of the ingredients are very expensive. The shrimp he uses, for instance, arrive live, packed in damp wood chips, and cost twenty dollars apiece, a high food cost for one item. “Even in Japan they can’t do this way,” he says. “So expensive.”

I think I’m getting a handle on Masa, and I say, “You have the most expensive restaurant in the biggest restaurant city in the world, and you say the most important thing you do, the
most
important thing, is ordering the food.”

Masa takes a sip of his tea and nods. “Very easy job.”

“Really, you’re just a crafty old cook. You figured out a way to charge the most money of any chef in the country, maybe the
world,
and you don’t even cook.”

He grins wide. “Nice, right?” he says, nodding vigorously and smiling. “Nice huh?
HaHaHaHaHaHa! HaHaHaHaHaHa!
”

I asked Masa the art-versus-craft question. I used to think that only in the rarest of circumstances did the chef rise above being a craftsman into the realm of the artist. Most chefs who claimed to be
artistes
were full of it as far as I was concerned. Only when a chef changed the way you saw the world, through cooking, did food truly become art, and that was rare, indeed. But also I was softening on the subject—the restaurant world was so diverse and food was changing so fast, I was willing to concede some ground on the artist issue, especially having spent so much time with Achatz at Trio.

So I asked Masa, whom I knew to be, at the very least, a performing artist, and a very good one—tickets to his show started now at $350 a seat, and there would be, could be, no understudies—what he thought.

“Yeah, I think it’s art,” he said. “What I do, I’m showing the people, I’m going to work clean, nicely, fast, each piece of sushi, more artistic, nice shape. Art is not always seen.” He placed an index finger below each eye. “When you taste it, part of the art. Each piece of fish. Rice. Fish. Good combination. Taste, texture, colorwise. Eat it. Beautiful. Melt. Flavor, nice flavor. Is a wonderful art. This is what I believe. Not only to see the art, not only the painting. The food is not the art…. Mostly it’s taste. Our job is taste. Eat. Beautiful. Wow. This is art I think.