Chef's Cut: The Art of Kaiseki with Niki Nakayama

traditionally Wysocki is a multi-course prefixed dinner it is based off of different cooking techniques and it originated from the Buddhist monasteries but has evolved with time to two different types of dinners the original one is a vegetarian base it's very simple and celebrates like a teaser whereas the newer version of it is they call it a banquet style type of dining and it's more elaborate more sophisticated in ways that they're using a lot more complex ingredients you our take on pieszecki is we call it the modern crisis his traditional krycek I feel that it's a lot more limiting in terms of seasoning the things that were allowed to use not so much allowed to use but the flavorings have to be purely Japanese flavoring seasonings there's no use of other ingredients that may be outside of them so for us to do the modern take on it means we're allowed to be a little bit more flexible with our ingredients I like to think of Keisuke as the philosophy of itself using local ingredients what is closest to you what represents your area the best and how to use those it's that using cooking methods that best showcase you when I think of Keisuke for us of course we're going to face a lot of it with telephony ingredients California vegetables for example we use uni from Santa Barbara sweet shrimp from Santa Barbara we use at things of such that are representative of what is local to us so we take the philosophy of Christ's sake but we don't do it in the way that oh we're doing a Japanese Keisuke we're doing Keisuke guess we're doing all the ideas of Keisuke but within our environment that is what we're doing it I think when we create a menu we have to think about it in terms of the whole mini I don't believe that every dish should be a dish that has a WOW factor of 10 everything should taste good but there should be a flow that it should be subtle some dishes settle some dishes more elaborate some dishes more subdued so we're not eating on volume 10 to every single dish but it's a flow like when we think about a dish for example you've just had something fun it was salty in nature the next dish that we would want to serve you is something soft something a little bit more sweet the textural difference between the previous dish and then when we think of that we think of the dish that was before that in the dish that's after that so it's consistently connecting every dish to each other without it being overbearing on our guests so if you had a dish that was completely repetitive in flavor and texture on and on and on and on I believe that that would make somebody tired of eating because it is such a long course we have to be thoughtful throughout the process one of my favorite parts of what we do is the plating aspect of it there's no rules about it which i think is wonderful a lot of it is based on feeling it's not something that I've thought through a lot of times I think about these like oh that's a great idea but then when you actually try it it doesn't always work out like the way I thought about it but I might be doing something that feels right that's going to work and then put it together and allow just allowed that space to like be crazy and try it a lot of times that works a lot better

Channel: The Art of Plating

Views: 105,660

Rating: 4.912796 out of 5

Keywords: kaiseki, Sushi (Cuisine), Cooking (Interest), Food, art, Chef (Profession), plating, Japanese Cuisine (Cuisine), fine dining, Sashimi (Dish)

Id: YorFbtA8JXg

Length: 4min 39sec (279 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 20 2014