The Original Forager: Miyamasou

The Original Forager: Miyamasou

Long before René Redzepi popularized locavorism, it thrived at Miyamasou, a two-Michelin-star restaurant and ryokan just outside Kyoto in Japan

By Tom Downey in the Wall Street Journal

MY FIRST GLIMPSE into the kitchen at Miyamasou, a two-Michelin-star Japanese restaurant and ryokan perched high above Kyoto in a mountainous region to the north, is of a few young cooks nimbly carving small pieces of chestnut wood into slender, slightly misshapen chopsticks. With a layer of dark-brown bark left along one end to form a grip, these are as different from generic chopsticks as jamón ibérico is from corner-deli ham. Hisato Nakahigashi, chef, owner and heir to Miyamasou, bounds out of the kitchen to greet me and then explains what I’m seeing: “Every morning, our cooks wake up and create chopsticks that our guests use that day,” he says. “Even something as simple as a chopstick can be a connection to the land.”

I’ve come to Miyamasou for an overnight visit because I’ve heard that the inn and restaurant offer a dining experience unlike any other in Japan. In current foodie popular history, foraging ends sometime after the age of hunter-gatherers and doesn’t reemerge until centuries later, when Copenhagen’s Noma makes it popular for chefs to pick their own ingredients in nearby forests and glens. But long before René Redzepi championed the idea of a cuisine based on foraging, chef Nakahigashi’s father invented a culinary genre of his own: tsumikusa, meaning freshly picked. In recent years, his son Hisato has applied his own creative spin to the concept, transforming Miyamasou into a pilgrimage site. Chefs and food experts such as Thomas Keller and Ruth Reichl have traveled thousands of miles to experience not just Nakahigashi’s version of holistic eating but a total immersion into the terroir of this remote mountain hamlet.

As he walks us around the grounds, Nakahigashi kneels by the river behind the ryokan. Carefully brushing away a layer of newly fallen snow, he digs up tiny, delicate green fukinoto (butterbur sprouts). “Now everything is available everywhere at anytime,” he says. “But for people long ago, there was extreme scarcity in winter. Right about now they would be dreaming of springtime, and these tiny fukinoto buds would be a sign that spring was coming.”

Nakahigashi’s great-grandfather opened this ryokan more than a hundred years ago as a hostel for pilgrims on their way up the 400 steps to the Daihizan Bujoji temple atop this mountain. Nakahigashi’s initiation into the tsumikusa culture and cuisine—and his experience with the taste of the season’s first fukinoto—began when he was very young. “It was a kind of game when I was a child here,” he says. “There was nothing else for us to do but to pick things, to fish, later to hunt.” Cultivated fukinoto is now eaten all over Japan, but Nakahigashi explains why the sprouts he’s just chosen are different. “In winter, natural fukinoto has to push out its moisture to prevent itself from freezing,” he says. “That makes it sweeter. You’ll taste it tonight.” As we walk back to the main building, I see a cook bent over a small artificial pond netting koi for our dinner. Nakahigashi explains that the carp take on the flavor of their water. These carp are from the neighboring Shiga prefecture, so he brings them here to swim in the fresh, clean mountain water before serving them. “It removes the muddiness,” he says.

As Nakahigashi leads us to the lodging wing of the ryokan, his wife, Sachiko, kimono clad and smiling, bows in greeting and insists on carrying our luggage despite my strong protests. The sleeping room is simple and serene—tatami mats cover the floor, and the gurgling of fast-flowing water drifts in through a window. The architecture, following the classical sukiya style as executed by one of its leading 20th-century proponents, Sotoji Nakamura, is shaped around the landscape and provides views of the adjacent stream. Before dinner, Sachiko leads us to an adjoining bathing building. This is not an onsen, a natural hot spring, but mountain springwater that has been warmed before being poured into a large wooden tub. Tall glass windows slide open to allow cool air from outside to flow in.

For dinner, we are seated at a counter in the rear of the main restaurant building. The counter—built out of slabs of toga (Japanese hemlock) and accommodating only a handful of people—is unusual for a ryokan, which typically serves meals inside the guest rooms.

One of the first things I taste is a tempura dish containing the fukinoto the chef had picked earlier. Its flavor is both bracingly bitter and delicately sweet. Nakahigashi explains that he has used a modern device, a Pacojet puréeing machine, to create the sweet sauce it’s tossed in. “Fukinoto is really fibrous. In my father’s time, he could never make a sauce out of it,” he says. “My way of expression through food is the same as his, but our techniques differ.” The koi is served as thin pink slices of sashimi, accompanied not by the customary wasabi, which isn’t found in this region, but by karami daikon, a spicy radish, which, mixed with soy sauce, serves as a powerful counterpoint to the sweetness of the fish.

A few dishes later, Nakahigashi returns with kuma nabe, a stew of bear meat garnished with fresh sprigs of a leafy vegetable called seri (water dropwort). “My father never served bear, either,” the chef says. “But I think it has the sweetest fat of any meat. Hunters around here sell me the bears they’ve hunted. It’s a great warming, winter dish.”

The Pacojet and the introduction of novel ingredients aren’t the only innovations that distinguish this chef from his father. “My father never went abroad,” he says. “I left Japan at age 18 to go work in the great restaurants of France, and I stayed there for six years.” At first, Nakahigashi thought he might remain in Europe longer, but after a few years cooking at esteemed places such as Louis XV, he felt a longing for Japan and Miyamasou. He didn’t return here directly, though: He went first to Tsuruko, in Kanazawa, a region with an ancient Japanese cuisine and culture that are similar to Kyoto’s and perhaps even better preserved. When his father died unexpectedly at the age of 55, Nakahigashi returned to Miyamasou to carry on his family legacy—and subtly make it his own.

Ryokans are deeply rooted in Japanese culture, the earliest inns having sprung up along the main Tokyo–Kyoto pathway in the 17th century. Today they come in all shapes and sizes, some with hundreds of rooms, others with just a handful. Ryokan food—typically kaiseki, multicourse cuisine included with the room rate—has a reputation for being elaborate, expensive and somewhat stodgy. What sets Miyamasou apart is both the quality of the food and how Nakahigashi has shaped his lodging experience around eating, inviting guests to the counter to see their meal being made and showing them the source of his cuisine in the fields and forests around the inn. (Double-occupancy room and board is $900 per night.)

As the smell of charcoal-grilled fish fills the room, ayu—sweetfish placed on metal skewers in such a way that they look as though they’re still swimming—are set down on the wooden counter. Then tiny morsels of sushi rice topped with foraged kogomi (fiddlehead ferns) arrive as a small intermediate course. Each dish is accompanied by a simple description, but nothing as Byzantine as the explanations you sometimes find with high-end cuisine in America. “Cooking is our life,” Nakahigashi says, “but it doesn’t have to be the life of every one of our customers. Our goal is not just to feed them well, but to enrich their lives with the feeling that the chef is thinking of them and what they want.”

Before I leave for Kyoto, Nakahigashi takes me on a tour of the adjoining temple grounds, which date back to 1154. “With such a small amount of flat, arable land, our culture needed a special relationship with nature in order for us to survive. That’s where the culture of so many of our gods, of our ancient forms of nature worship, all came from.” We wander to a field nearby, and the chef bends down and digs again for some of the herbs that will feed his guests tonight. “When you cook ingredients that you’ve collected yourself,” he says, “there is a truth to the food.”