Two master chefs wield their culinary magic in the Northwest

by Bruce Rutledge

Japanese cuisine has caught the American imagination in recent years, but how much do we know about this complex culinary tradition?

We know it’s healthy and we know it tastes good, and for many of us, that’s all we need to know. But if we probe a little deeper, we find a cuisine guided by both refined aesthetic principles and a strong connection to the seasons. We find a cuisine that embraces simplicity and demands the highest quality ingredients.

“Food is culture,” says Shiro Kashiba, chef and owner of Shiro’s in Seattle’s Belltown district, “and shun – seasonal delicacies – is the basis of Japanese cuisine.”

Tak Suetsugu, a kaiseki chef and owner of Satsuma in Gig Harbor, offers a different perspective: “Food is history. Doing something difficult to bring pleasure to your customers. That’s at the heart of Japanese cuisine.”

So who’s right?

The answer to that question — “both of them” — hints at the depth and breadth of Japanese cuisine.

On the one hand, Japanese cuisine, or washoku as it is called in Japanese, can be fresh, fast and healthy. Just watch Kashiba quickly prepare sushi behind the counter and hand-deliver it nigiri style to his guests.

It can be affordable too. When looking for good menu items, Kashiba says “cheap is best” because that means the ingredients are apt to be local and not trucked in from afar. For example, he uses local Manila clams, sifting through piles of butter clams to find them. “The Manila clams are a little longer and have a beautiful design,” he says.. Kashiba explains that traditional Edomae sushi, which he serves at his restaurant in Belltown (see page xx for a review), was created on the concept of eating local fish pulled from the Edo (now Tokyo) Bay. “I do Seattle-style Edomae sushi,” he explains when asked why his menu is filled with local delicacies such as oysters, geoduck and salmon.

On the other hand, Japanese cuisine can involve painstaking detail and hours – sometimes days -- of prep work. Chef Suetsugu will warn visitors to his Satsuma restaurant in Gig Harbor that their meal is going to take awhile to prepare. He points to a bean used in his kaiseki bento, a kuromame from Hyogo Prefecture that he slowly cooks for three days before serving. “It costs $1,” he explains. That’s $1 a bean, not $1 a pound.

Suetsugu is a very respected kaiseki chef in the greater Seattle area and a graduate of the prestigious Tsuji Cooking School in Kobe. He is a Michelangelo in the kitchen, mixing colors and seasonal foods and hounding his staff to do better. His kaiseki bento is a palace of colors and tastes. Everything down to the lacquerware is chosen for a reason. There are no afterthoughts in this chef’s kitchen.

Thin slivers of daikon radish nestled next to gleaming slabs of sashimi are sliced by hand by Suetsugu and his staff. “When you slice a daikon by hand, it shines and is thinner. Rinse it, and it forms a nice little mountain. It reflects the Satsuma spirit,” he says of his home region on the island of Kyushu. “While one falls alone, together they stand.” And with that, history class is adjourned.

Kashiba and Suetsugu represent the bookends of Japanese cuisine, and in between are centuries worth of cookbooks, recipes and tradition. The one common theme that ties the two chefs together is the emphasis on high-quality ingredients, whether it’s the homemade dashi soup stock Suetsugu uses at Satsuma or the locally sourced matsutake mushrooms and albacore tuna served at Shiro’s.

The other guiding principle behind Japanese cuisine is its simplicity. While Chef Suetsugu’s palatial kaiseki bento looks anything but simple, the dishes use very few herbs or heavy sauces. The essence of the food is key, and this is why simplicity and high-quality ingredients go hand in hand.

Listening to Suetsugu and Kashiba talk about their craft, it’s clear that washoku embraces ideas we Americans are beginning to embrace as well: It’s a diet low in fat and high in fiber. It uses plenty of fish and vegetables. And it is in synch with the seasons.

But it is also a richly complex cuisine that uses soy sauce, miso paste, sake, mirin, dashi, ginger, wasabi and much more to enhance the meal. In other words, it’s a cuisine big enough to embrace both the fast, fresh and aesthetically simple sushi and the minute detail and visual splendor of kaiseki.