Trends

Beyond sushi

It is said that sushi is an acquired taste, but then there is a lot more to Japanese cuisine than just raw fish. Beryl Menezes explores the present and future trends of Japanese cuisine in the country

Japanese cuisine, a lesser-known delight savoured chiefly by the city's elite, may soon become a popular dining option if top city restaurateurs are to be believed. Aiming to popularise Japanese cuisine in India, maido india, a dealer in Japanese cooking equipment and supplies, will be organising a Japanese food festival from November 6-23. The festival will include sushi preparations by expert Japanese chefs specially being flown down for the event, a sake brunch and dinner, as well as demonstrations of Japanese cuisine by students of Institute of Hotel Management and Catering Technology, Dadar. Most of the events are free of cost and open to public.

As a prelude to the festival, Express Hospitality interviewed chefs from Japanese restaurants across the city to get their take on just where the cuisine stands.

All in the name

Chef Hemant Oberoi Corporate Chef - Luxury Division & executive grand chef, The Taj Mahal Palace & Tower	Chef Farrokh Khambata Owner, Joss
Chef Thomas Lai Master Chef, Far East, Rodas	Chef Shunsuke Yoshizawa Junior Sous Chef, San Qi, Four Seasons Hotel, Mumbai
Chef James Biaka Executive Chef, Tetsuma

Japanese cuisine has four basic cooking methods, under which many popular dishes are grouped. The 'domburi', which is rice topped with cooked meat, eggs, vegetables or raw fish; 'agemono' which literally means 'fried items' that includes 'tempura' or deep-fried dishes; 'yakimono' which includes pan-fried styles of cooking like teriyaki, teppanyaki and robatayaki; and 'nimono', a kind of stew of varied ingredients. The difference between teriyaki, teppanyaki and robertoyaki is that while teriyaki is a dish with sauce or 'terri', teppanyaki is cooked on a flat, wide pan called a 'teppan' and robatayaki is skewered, grilled meats or vegetables, cooked in a tandoor-like Japanese grill. While sushi can be served raw or cooked on a platter of vinegar-and-sugar seasoned sticky rice, sashmi literally means 'raw fish'.

Japanese eat three meals a day, albeit in small quantities, using a variety of bowls of various sizes for rice and sauces, baskets for deep-fried dishes and platters for grilled items, and the mandatory pair of chopsticks. A traditional Japanese set meal, called 'Kaiseki', would consist of 'amuse buche' or a pre-starter that may include steamed tofu, potato starch or mashed sweet potato, followed by appetisers that would include soya beans or a small portion of sashmi. This would be followed by a selection of robatayaki, tempura or teppanyaki for the main course, served along with sticky rice or soba (buckwheat) or udon (wheat) noodles and 'stukemono' or Japanese pickles, comprising of pickled vegetables like radish, sour plums or cucumber, and sushi to end the meal. Alternatively, in a Japanese restaurant, food could be served in a two-tiered bentobox, the Japanese version of a thali or pre-plated meal, with a varied selection of vegetarian or non-vegetarian items. Traditionally, 'singha' or Japanese beer, Japanese whisky, sake, green tea or a variety of wheat, potato, sesame or rice-based liqueurs accompany the meal. Alternatively, red or white wines also pair well with the cuisine. The meal does not necessarily end with a dessert. However, Japanese do have a variety of desserts that range from sweet beans with rice to rice pancakes and a variety of ice-creams, two of the most popular being green tea and wasabi ice- cream.

As far as dining etiquette is concerned, Japanese families usually sit together on a mat on the floor and eat from low tables, serving themselves individually from dishes kept in the centre of the table. However, when important guests visit, it is usually the tradition for the woman of the house to serve, as a sign of respect for the guest.

Penetrating the Indian market

Mumbai, known to house the most experimental tastebuds, has the largest number of Japanese restaurants in the whole country. Still, the number of Japanese restaurants in the city number, at the most, seven to eight, with close to 100 Oriental restaurants serving a small selection of sushi or sashmi. San Qi at Four Seasons Hotel in Mumbai is perhaps the only restaurant in Mumbai serving 100 per cent authentic Japanese fare, undoubtedly catering only to a few top-end clientele who have acquired a taste for the Japanese diet, no doubt from tasting it on repeated trips at Japanese restaurants across the world.

According to Chef Shunsuke Yoshizawa, junior sous chef of San Qi, Japanese restaurants, as a trend, are catching on in India at a much gradual pace than the rest of the world because Indians, by nature, are less experimental and not very aware of different cuisines, thus harbouring misconceptions about many of them. However, he adds that with more Indians travelling abroad, this misconception is changing fast. "Festivals such as the one coming up, as well as individual Japanese restaurants hosting their own food festivals and bringing down Japanese chefs to provide demos to other chefs in the restaurant can also help spread awareness and explode myths surrounding Japanese cuisine," remarks Chef Thomas Lai of Far East, the Oriental restaurant at Rodas, Mumbai which hosted a Japanese food festival three months ago. "Hotel management institutes and hotels can play a major role in educating masses by flying down Japanese experts to train students and other interested members of the general public," adds Harry Cheng, director of maido india, which has played a major role in facilitating import of Japanese ingredients, supplying to most restaurants across the city. However, while Japanese

cuisine may take much longer to percolate to middle-class consumers, hotels and stand alone Japanese restaurants could attract more customers by reducing their prices, probably by forming a common organisation to share costs of imported items or by setting up sushi or teriyaki bars that are very popular in Japan as well as in the rest of the world. Japanese restaurateurs could also educate customers about the health benefits of light Japanese cuisine by providing a short description of the dishes and their health benefits in menus.

According to Chef Hemant Oberoi, corporate chef - Luxury Division & executive grand chef, The Taj Mahal Palace & Tower, Mumbai, the investment that goes into setting up a Japanese restaurant is higher than that of an ordinary restaurant, chiefly due to the high cost of imported ingredients. With the exception of common vegetables like onions, tomatoes and peppers, most ingredients cannot be substituted with local ones. Hence, almost all ingredients used in Japanese restaurants are imported from countries like Indonesia, Chile, Norway, Australia, the Atlantic and Japan. Be it seafood such as yellow-fin tuna, Japanese salmon, sea bass or oysters; meat such as Kobe or Wagyu beef or goose liver; accompaniments like sticky rice, udon noodles, noori (seaweed sheets); or vegetables like shiitake mushrooms, edamamme (green beans), kaboocha (small pumkin), micro cherry tomatoes, tiny turnips, daikon (white radish), miso, silken tofu, as well as the whole range of sauces from soy to mirin (sweet cooking sake) and sesame oil, are all imported to ensure authenticity.

However, for the Indian palate, most restaurateurs agree that fusion Japanese like the Nobu or Chef Morimoto-style of cuisine offered in Wasabi, one of the most popular Japanese restaurants at the Taj hotel in Mumbai and Delhi, are more popular. This could be because authentic Japanese cuisine is quite bland and mainly consists of seafood, which doesn't go down very well with the majority of vegetarian Indian diners. Thus, most seafood options are offered as vegetarian options at all Japanese restaurants in the city, tweaked to suite Indian taste buds. "Although it may be easy to set up a restaurant, it is difficult to maintain it, and that is where innovation comes in. In order to attract people, one has to keep changing and experimenting, offering something different each time. As far as Wasabi is concerned, the secret to the success was getting Chef Morimoto to train the chefs here, which of course was carried forward due to constant innovation,"remarks Oberoi. Adds Farrokh Khambata, owner of Joss, another restaurant in Mumbai popular for its Japanese food, "Investment in a Japanese restaurant is linked to many factors like high quality ingredients, special cooking equipment, storage, freightage and import, and of course, an expert chef. At Joss, we have a trained in-house Japanese chef and a Japanese consultant is also flown down every month to provide demos to our chefs, including me," Thus, according to him, it is only through constant learning and providing value-for-money, unpretentious cuisine that the restaurant is still successfully running.

As far as training requirements for Japanese chefs is concerned, restaurateurs across the city are divided on the actual number of years it takes to become proficient in making the perfect sushi. However, they all agree that it is an elaborate skill and art that takes anywhere from five to ten years to acquire under the expertise of Japanese master chef. Remarks James Biaka, executive chef of Tetsuma, Mumbai, "One has to spend at least six months learning the various types of Japanese cooking, namely, agemono, yakimono, nimono, soups and sushi." As of now, there is no institute in India that offers training programmes for Japanese cuisine, although the Institute of Hotel Management in Mumbai does teach students how to make sushi and a few other Japanese dishes.

The future for Japanese cuisine does seem bright though. Incorporating Japanese dishes in menus of Oriental restaurants would probably help towards making the cuisine more popular. And with more people visiting, proper awareness about the cuisine would lead to a taste for it being acquired. Perhaps somewhere down the line it could even pose as competition to the ever-popular Chinese cuisine. Already the number of Japanese restaurants has increased from just one in Mumbai three years ago to at least ten around the country today. Thus in Farrokh Khambata's own words, "Japanese cuisine is not just not just a fad, indeed it's here to stay."