Kaiseki Komuro’s omakase meal celebrates the beauty of four seasons. The menu follows a traditional style, beginning with an appetizer, followed by soup, sashimi, grilled dish, kuchikawari, boiled dish, rice, and dessert. Thanks to the chef’s bottomless curiosity to find new ingredients and create new recipes, his cuisine is constantly evolving.

“My mission is to find ways to convey the arrival of each season using ingredients in their most natural forms,” he says. “I’m constantly asking myself, ‘How do I create the most authentic cuisine?’”

The chef first devotes himself to making dashi, the heart of traditional Japanese cuisine. He bathes kombu seaweed from Hokkaido in water to infuse its elegant umami, and adds freshly shaved hongare bonito flakes from Makurazaki to deepen the flavor. Depending on the season, he also uses additional ingredients like grilled pike conger bones.

Served in a marble-patterned glass bowl is a beautiful sea urchin appetizer. Morsels of fresh sea urchin are mixed in a clear tomato-flavored jelly with an assortment of seasonal ingredients like corn, pen shell, matsutake mushrooms, tiny micro tomatoes and cucumber, hasu-imo taro stalk and myoga ginger. Every bite brings about different combinations of textures and flavors.

The hassun platter is a tapestry of seasonal delicacies. Packed neatly in a narrow rectangular plate are pieces of slow-cooked octopus, pike conger and kuruma shrimp hidden inside a hoozuki lantern plant, pike conger and cucumber salad in sesame vinaigrette, egg squares, shrimp with pickled blowfish eggs, monkfish liver in plum wine jelly, Manganji chilli pepper stuffed with salt-water eel and a sweet piece of apricot.

The day’s sashimi is Japanese flatfish. Caught off the shores of Miyagi Prefecture, the soft white fish is served next to pieces of skin and fin, offering a variety of textures. The sashimi is served fresh, not matured, to bring out its delicate flavor, and drizzled with soy-citrus sauce and plum paste.

One of Komuro’s favorite summer ingredients is pike conger. In a broth dusted with kuzu root starch, a piece of the seasonal fish is wrapped around into a thick roll. Soaking up the umami of the broth, the fatty fillet is moist, tender and sweet. The slices of muskmelon add a refreshing accent.

Sweetfish from Katsura River, which runs through the western outskirts of Kyoto, is grilled to perfection on top of a portable shichirin charcoal grill. Cooked over a bed of bamboo leaves, the aromatic smoke fills the room.

For the rice dish, he steams pike conger rice in a large black donabe pot. Infusing every drop of umami from the dashi made using fish bones, the grains are mixed in with shaved gobo burdock roots, deepening the flavor even more.

INGREDIENTS
Besides the central Toyosu market, Komuro sources many Kyoto vegetables from local vendors. Matsutake mushrooms are shipped directly from a grower in Tamba in Hyogo Prefecture. Fresh seafood comes from a fishmonger in Akashi, also in Hyogo. The variety of pike conger that he likes is fed with small fish known as konago, or sand lance, and the season lasts until about the first week of September.

The chef visits growers in local communities in search for the best seasonal produce, and tries to convey their passions through the cuisine. He loves the shirako takenoko bamboo shoots grown by a farmer in Tsukahara in Kyoto and has found excellent vendors for wild suppon softshell turtle, Japanese eel and various kinds of mushrooms. He also loves the quality of the rice he sources from Onoda Farm in Hakushu, Yamanashi Prefecture.

“I chose this particular brand because of the water,” he explains. “Rice grown with good natural water is simply so delicious.”

The exclusive sake selection is made by Sakacho liquor store in Kasukabe in Saitama Prefecture. They send the restaurant some great vintages including seasonal sake. “I visit multiple breweries during the peak fermentation season to hear about the sake makers impression on the year’s vintage, while sensing their passions and the energy in the space,” he says. The restaurant also stocks a number of vintages from Katsunuma wine region in Yamanashi Prefecture such as Grace Wine. “I think wines made in Japan pair best with Japanese cuisine,” the chef comments.