The New Yorker:

In 1965, the legendary Lyonnais chef Paul Bocuse, who had just earned his third Michelin star, travelled to Japan. In Osaka, he met with Shizuo Tsuji, a former crime reporter who, in his late twenties, decided to pursue his passion for classical French and Japanese cuisines by opening a cooking school. Tsuji introduced Bocuse to kaiseki, an elaborate, formal meal that is considered the pinnacle of Japanese cuisine. Kaiseki is not a specific dish or technique but a format, often involving a dozen or more tiny courses. It shares a history with the austere rituals of the Japanese tea ceremony, and incorporates aesthetic elements from Japanese art forms such as calligraphy and flower arranging. In its exactitude and restraint, Bocuse saw an approach that was in many ways the very opposite of decadent French haute cuisine. Returning to Lyon, he drew upon the principles of kaiseki as he pioneered what became known as nouvelle cuisine, a modern reimagining of French cooking that emphasized seasonality, the quality of ingredients, and a dramatic procession of plates composed with painterly flair.

The dots and squiggles of nouvelle cuisine have faded from fashion, but nearly every contemporary restaurant’s tasting menu owes its structure to Bocuse’s dégustation, which in turn owes its identity to Japanese kaiseki. In Japan, kaiseki restaurants are fairly common, but in America the tradition exists largely as an idea or an influence. “To be able to run your own kaiseki restaurant, you have to be trained in kaiseki restaurants for years and years,” Naoko Takei Moore, a cookbook author and Japanese food expert, told me. The chef Kyle Connaughton spent decades studying the intricacies of kaiseki cuisine before opening his Sonoma restaurant, SingleThread, but he still does not consider himself a kaiseki chef. Dave Beran, who took inspiration from kaiseki for his tasting-menu restaurant Dialogue, in Santa Monica, said, “If you asked me to name five kaiseki restaurants in the U.S., I couldn’t do it.”

Go to link