Day 30: Dinner at Kikunoi (Saturday, July 26)

We changed our flight from Hong Kong to Tokyo to Saturday morning (from the afternoon) so that we would a) be able to take the bus directly to our hotel (Grand Hyatt in Roppongi Hills) and b) be able to eat at Kikunoi. Kikunoi has its roots in Kyoto, as does all great Kaiseki, but Chef Yoshihiro Murata recently opened this outpost here in Tokyo, which is great since we aren't going to Kyoto on this trip. For those of you that are unfamiliar with kaiseki, it is a very traditional cuisine from Kyoto, based on the freshness of each season with a fairly scripted sequence of courses (in terms of style, not ingredients). Here's what we had with our meal on Saturday. For some of our dishes, it was easy to tell which traditional kaiseki course it was... but for others not so much. If we know, then I'll describe the course a bit (all descriptions come from Chef Murata's book, Kaiseki).

1 - Sakizuke

This course is also called tsukidashi or otoshi and is the equivalent of an amuse-geule in French cuisine. For our Sakizuke course, we had a fantastic fig that had been poached with white miso and then had shaved bonito on top. The recipe in the book also indicates that there is a small amount of mustard in the dish, as well.

2 - Hassun

Traditionally, the second course is used to set the seasonal theme and consists of several small dishes. Ours was true to this - we had one spoon containing sea urchin roe and a quail egg, and then three flower pods, each containing a different vegetable dish.

3 - Mukozuke

This course is typically a sliced dish of seasonal sashimi. Our sashimi was some type of sea bream with small pieces of tomato gelee and steamed eggplant, as well.

Our next three courses all contained Hamo (pike eel or conger) in various forms. It's not clear to us exactly which kaiseki courses these dishes match, so I'll just describe them.

4 - Hamo two ways - this preparation consisted of two different pieces of hamo, topped with shiso buds.

5 - Hamo and Sticky Rice

This time, our Hamo was broiled and covered with a sauce (not sure what it was) and then placed on top of sticky rice formed like a piece of nigiri sushi. The hamo was quite good in this form, but Matt didn't care much for the sticky rice

6 - Hamo and Tofu Soup

This was one of the best courses of the night. Tofu and hamo in a clear broth soup with some peppers and other vegetables too. It was just perfect.

7 - Our palate cleanser for the evening was a sorbet. There were a few ingredients, we think, but all we remember is the overwhelming celery flavor. Not very pleasant, but effective at clearing the palate.
8 - Our yakimono course was also outstanding - Abalone and uni cooked in a salt dome. The abalone is steamed and then combined with uni on a bed of wakame (seaweed) and then topped with more wakame. Then a dome of salt is created over the dish and it's baked. Once you take away the salt dome and the top layer of wakame, here's what you get... delicious abalone.

9 - The next course was very simple noodles - made from arrowroot, or something like that - served in a giant block of ice.

10 - Our tenth course was just simple simmered vegetables (and a couple pieces of octapus) served in a ginger pudding. The flavors were incredibly clean and straightforward.

11 - Then it was time for one more small course of sashimi.

12 - Our final food course - rice. They took the grilled fish seen in the first picture and then chopped it up right into the rice. It was served with a bowl of red pepper soup (delicious). We were pretty stuffed at this point, so we didn't make much progress on our rice. They packaged it up for us, though, and we took it back to the hotel to have for breakfast the next morning.

13 - Dessert came with a choice, so we opted for one of each. Viv's dessert was the peaches with mint ice cream, and Matt took the black sesame pudding with black sugar ice cream. Both were fantastic.