In 1965, the legendary Lyonnais chef Paul Bocuse, who had just earned his third Michelin star, travelled to Japan. In Osaka, he met with Shizuo Tsuji, a former crime reporter who, in his late twenties, decided to pursue his passion for classical French and Japanese cuisines by opening a cooking school. Tsuji introduced Bocuse to kaiseki, an elaborate, formal meal that is considered the pinnacle of Japanese cuisine. Kaiseki is not a specific dish or technique but a format, often involving a dozen or more tiny courses. It shares a history with the austere rituals of the Japanese tea ceremony, and incorporates aesthetic elements from Japanese art forms such as calligraphy and flower arranging. In its exactitude and restraint, Bocuse saw an approach that was in many ways the very opposite of decadent French haute cuisine. Returning to Lyon, he drew upon the principles of kaiseki as he pioneered what became known as nouvelle cuisine, a modern reimagining of French cooking that emphasized seasonality, the quality of ingredients, and a dramatic procession of plates composed with painterly flair.
The dots and squiggles of nouvelle cuisine have faded from fashion, but nearly every contemporary restaurant’s tasting menu owes its structure to Bocuse’s dégustation, which in turn owes its identity to Japanese kaiseki. In Japan, kaiseki restaurants are fairly common, but in America the tradition exists largely as an idea or an influence. “To be able to run your own kaiseki restaurant, you have to be trained in kaiseki restaurants for years and years,” Naoko Takei Moore, a cookbook author and Japanese food expert, told me. The chef Kyle Connaughton spent decades studying the intricacies of kaiseki cuisine before opening his Sonoma restaurant, SingleThread, but he still does not consider himself a kaiseki chef. Dave Beran, who took inspiration from kaiseki for his tasting-menu restaurant Dialogue, in Santa Monica, said, “If you asked me to name five kaiseki restaurants in the U.S., I couldn’t do it.”
The most prominent American kaiseki restaurant is n/naka, a small Los Angeles establishment owned and run by the forty-four-year-old Japanese-American chef Niki Nakayama. Japanese cuisine, at the high end, is virtually all made by men. When n/naka opened, it may have been the only kaiseki restaurant run by a woman in any country. Housed in a low gray building on a quiet corner in Palms, a neighborhood tucked between sleepy Culver City and the Santa Monica Freeway, it is open four nights a week, and seats twenty-six guests at a time.
Nakayama was born and raised in L.A., the youngest daughter of immigrant parents who owned a wholesale seafood distribution company. When she opened n/naka, in 2011, it was quickly recognized as a jewel in the city’s formidable Japanese-restaurant scene. In 2012, the Los Angeles Times critic Jonathan Gold wrote that “the sheer level of cooking in this modest bungalow eclipses what you find in grand dining rooms whose chefs appear in national magazines.” In 2015, Nakayama was featured on the first season of “Chef’s Table,” the Netflix anthology series created by David Gelb, the director of the hit documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.” Since then, Zagat has ranked it the No. 1 restaurant in Los Angeles. Chrissy Teigen, the supermodel and culinary personality, tweeted to her millions of followers that it was one of her favorite restaurants in the world.
Every Sunday morning, at 10 a.m. Pacific time, n/naka’s online-reservation system releases a week’s worth of tables for three months in the future; by 10:01 a.m., there are none left. Nakayama regularly receives gifts and letters from people pleading for seats. Aspiring diners have offered to bring in their own tables and chairs, or have shown up at the kitchen door and tried to palm a few hundred bucks to the general manager. One man offered Nakayama the temporary use of a luxury car.
N/naka has often been miscategorized as a sushi restaurant, the style of Japanese dining establishment most familiar to Americans. But sushi and kaiseki are in many ways opposites. Sushi is as much a culinary performance as it is a category of food. The itamae (head chef), usually wearing a kimono and a headband, prepares your maki and nigiri right in front of you. There’s theatre in slicing the fish, brushing on the sauces, shaping the rice between agile fingers; there’s banter with the customers, and macho jockeying with other chefs behind the bar. In a sushi tasting menu, or omakase, the chef is free to improvise the meal as he goes along, choosing whatever fish looks best. (The word “omakase” means “I trust you.”) Kaiseki, by contrast, has a predetermined flow, its interrelated courses incorporating dozens—if not hundreds—of ingredients and techniques to form a single narrative arc. Even the most exorbitant sushi omakase can be over with in forty-five minutes; a kaiseki meal takes hours to unfold. Junko Sakai, a Japanese writer, has likened a sushi chef’s approach to that of an essayist, and a kaiseki chef’s to that of a novelist.
And yet kaiseki does not broadcast its own cleverness. There is no futuristic culinary chemistry or flamboyant tableside showmanship. Its practitioners talk about it almost as a form of service, a subordination of the self. When I met Nakayama, she told me that, in kaiseki, “the ingredients are more important than you, the cooking is more important than you. Everything about the food is more important than you, and you have to respect that.” She added, “There’s a part of it that’s really prideful and ambitious, and yet it tries to hold itself back.”
Nakayama spent years immersing herself in the details of the art form. “She loves the obsessiveness,” Carole Iida, her wife and collaborator, said. Nakayama and Iida met in 2012, several months after n/naka opened, when Nakayama was working eighteen-hour days in the kitchen. Soon Iida, who is also a cook, closed her sushi restaurant to become the sous-chef at n/naka. Where Nakayama radiates creative energy, Iida is steady and direct, and she quickly assumed a role as the protector of Nakayama’s vision, taking over aspects of managing the restaurant that Nakayama had neglected. The two have a running joke that there is an n/naka B.C. and an n/naka A.C.—before and after Carole.
In the early days of n/naka, Nakayama made the menu as Japanese as possible. In a patch of earth outside the restaurant’s street-facing window, she tried to plant an ornamental Japanese garden for diners to gaze at during their three-hour meals. But the plants, and others in her yard at home, languished. Eventually, she swapped in local greenery, and gave over her home garden to vegetables that would flourish in the dry California heat: pink radishes, lettuce and chard, sweet tomatoes. Her food, she came to realize, could be “California kaiseki”—like her, a fusion of Japan and L.A.
At the heart of kaiseki is the notion of shun: the moment when a particular fruit, vegetable, or fish is at its absolute best. Some kaiseki chefs divide the year not into quarters but into seventy-two micro-seasons. The meal’s first course, sakizuke, is like a waymark on a map: You are here. In mid-January, when I ate at n/naka, with the Los Angeles Times restaurant critic Bill Addison, that meant a display of subtropical winter sweetness: diced Hokkaido scallop under a vivid orange gelée, next to an even brighter carrot purée, out of which ribbons of crisp-fried purple carrot streamed like the rays of the Southern California sun. Our server, an elegant Japanese woman in a sharp black blazer, told us to think of the second course, a multitude of two-bite dishes arranged on an oblong tray, as the table of contents for the rest of the meal: ankimo (monkfish liver) pâté; a skewer of lobster sashimi daubed with salty-tart preserved plum; a tiny porcelain cup of chawanmushi (savory custard); enoki-mushroom tempura, like a lacy fan of coral, with a cube of fresh persimmon. The course was a sensory strobe light, moving rapidly from rich to delicate, subtle to sharp.
Nakayama runs n/naka according to omotenashi, a practice of compassionate service that involves anticipating guests’ wants. The spacious dining area is divided by wooden screens into intimate subsections. Nakayama keeps extensive notes on her customers—what they ate, how they reacted—and makes sure that a returning guest is never served the same menu twice. The thirteen-course meal costs two hundred and twenty-five dollars per person, making it one of the most expensive dinners in Los Angeles. Yet many of the n/naka fans I spoke to remarked on its absence of cheffy self-indulgence. “There’s an almost visceral egolessness,” Addison said, after our meal. “It feels like a relief, after eating so many intensely performative tasting-menu meals, to just be present, to feel a quiet and awake astonishment at these ingredients, and the care that has gone into them.” Evan Kleiman, the host of the public-radio show “Good Food,” told me, “I think it’s the most unpretentious tasting-menu experience one can have.”
The origins of modern kaiseki are hard to pinpoint. The popular story dates it back to the sixteenth century, when the tea master Sen no Rikyū is said to have codified its essential principle of seasonality. He is also said to have declared that the meal should consist of no more than a cup of soup with rice, fish, and pickles, all of which had to be of the highest quality—an opulence of perfection, rather than of wealth. Eventually, kaiseki branched into two traditions: the spare meal still served with the tea ceremony today, and the luxurious kaiseki served in restaurants—without tea, but with plenty of sake on hand. In kanji, there are two ways of writing “kaiseki,” to refer to these different strains.
Hundreds of rules can govern the preparation of a kaiseki meal. Almost all of them serve aesthetic or gastronomic ends, though to a nonexpert they can seem ludicrously fussy. Plates should be arranged with the main element slightly to the rear, so that, to a seated guest looking down, it appears to be centered. Pieces of sashimi should be served in odd numbers. Round food should be served in square vessels, and square food in round vessels. No two bowls of the same shape and material should consecutively appear. Food that is grilled should precede food that is steamed, which in turn should precede food that is fried. Ingredients with narrow, days-long windows of shun—like bamboo shoots in spring, or plum blossoms in winter—should be included not only to bring diners joy but to prompt a melancholy reflection on the relentlessness of time and the inevitability of death.
Almost all of kaiseki’s rules can be subverted by the chef; knowing how and when to break them is the most confident expression of kaiseki mastery. For the hearty course called shiizakana, which typically features a meaty soup or stew, Nakayama serves pasta: a swirl of spaghetti alla chitarra, tossed in a creamy ragu of abalone liver and pickled cod roe, topped with Burgundy black truffles. In a meal of restrained and finely drawn flavors, it growls with a brazen decadence. It is the only dish that never leaves n/naka’s menu.
When we’d finished eating, Nakayama came out to say hello. She is five feet one and slender, with long dark hair that she ties back in a ponytail at the collar of her white chef’s jacket. Some chefs make the rounds and glad-hand, but Nakayama emerges to greet only one table at a time, for a brief exchange of gratitude before each diner leaves. As the staggered meals of n/naka’s first round of seating drew to an end, the noren curtains between the dining room and the kitchen flipped and waved with the chef’s near-constant passage.
Nakayama and Iida live a mile from the restaurant, in a mid-century modern house that they share with three rescue dogs and Iida’s mother, Mieko. Their home, like the restaurant, is spare but warm. For Nakayama, its biggest allure was a room hidden in the basement where she could keep her records, her electric piano, and her collection of guitars. As a teen-ager, her passion was music; she studied piano for a year after high school, then on a whim travelled to Japan, hoping to pursue a career as a singer-songwriter. After a few months in Tokyo, feeling aimless, she went to Niigata, a port city a few hundred miles to the north, and spent the summer working in the kitchen at a traditional ryokan inn owned by one of her mother’s cousins. Like many ryokan, this one served its guests exquisite kaiseki meals.
One recent morning, as I sat with Nakayama and Iida at their sunny kitchen table over a breakfast of miso soup, rice, pickles, and an onsen egg, Nakayama recalled her time working at the inn. When she’s off duty, Nakayama is ebullient and discursive, a quicksilver conversationalist who stretches out her words with a hint of Valley Girl drawl. She described an awakening over a plate of pickled vegetables. “Suddenly I was, like, Huh, I really like this little dish where I stand the food up on it, and it looks like a little mountain!” she said. “I really like putting that one last carrot on top so that it looks alive!” She returned to L.A. to attend culinary school, and then worked for a year in the back kitchen of a high-end Brentwood sushi bar. In 1997, she returned to Niigata, this time as a formal apprentice to Masa Sato, the kaiseki chef at her family’s inn. She stayed for three years. “The education I got wasn’t about skill—it was about taste,” she said. “I learned what real Japanese food should taste like. Japanese food isn’t about trying to mix a lot of flavors; it’s about the ability to season well, how to add the right amount of salt, what temperature everything is served at. That was the best education I could get.”
Nakayama hoped to open a kaiseki restaurant in L.A. Her family, who had agreed to provide funding, worried that kaiseki was too exotic for L.A. diners, and urged her to consider a more conventional restaurant. In 2000, she opened Azami Sushi Cafe, on a commercial strip near the neighborhood line between Hollywood and Fairfax. She tried to distinguish Azami from the city’s legion of similar restaurants, offering fresh-grated wasabi and exceptional, well-priced fish acquired from her family’s seafood business. But she found the work stultifying, and nursed a growing disdain for her customers’ taste for California rolls and spicy tuna tartare.
It also became increasingly clear to her that being a woman was a professional liability. The traditional sushi world, like much of Japanese society, remains highly gender-segregated; women interested in becoming itamae have struggled to find sushi masters willing to employ them. Women who do enter Japanese fine dining often end up leaving after a few years. Yubako Kamohara, the head chef of Tsurutokame, a women-run kaiseki restaurant in Tokyo that opened four years after n/naka, told me, through a translator, that the industry is unwilling “to accommodate women’s needs.”
Even in Japan, you’re far more likely to see a non-Japanese man behind the sushi counter than a Japanese woman. Nakayama told me, “I’ve worked with male sushi chefs who have no sushi background, who came from being a salesperson, and just hopped into the sushi bar because they wanted a new career—and those people got way more respect than me.” Sushi chefs have concocted all sorts of pseudoscientific reasons that women don’t belong behind the counter. When Yoshikazu Ono, the son of the famed Tokyo sushi chef Jiro Ono, was asked, by the Wall Street Journal, why there were no women featured in the documentary about his father, he explained that “because of the menstrual cycle women have an imbalance in their taste.”
Azami earned appreciative writeups on local restaurant blogs, but Nakayama felt that she was sometimes painted as a novelty for what the Web site LAist called her “girl-powered sushi.” One night, during dinner service, three men came into the restaurant and stood just inside the door. Nakayama recalled, “They were obviously Japanese, obviously businessmen. They saw us”—Nakayama and her female sous-chef—“and they took a pause. I remember they turned and looked at each other and were, like, ‘Let’s go.’ And they left. And me being me, of course, in my mind there was a mental middle finger going up: ‘Don’t come back.’ But I carried that feeling with me: ‘This is why people don’t take me seriously—because I’m a woman.’ ”
Nakayama sold Azami in 2008 and put a down payment on the n/naka space. She leased the building to another business for a year, and spent two years after that renovating. Meanwhile, she worked as the chef at a deli owned by her sister in Arcadia, the Los Angeles suburb where they’d grown up. In the evenings, Nakayama turned the tiny storefront into the San Gabriel Valley’s most unlikely hot ticket—a “secret Japanese chef’s table,” Chowhound wrote—cooking eight-course meals for just a handful of customers a night. Most of them had heard about the dinners through word of mouth, and few knew anything about the chef. Nakayama started looking forward to the moment when she’d step out from the closed kitchen to thank guests for coming, and see the look of surprise on their faces.
Nakayama’s original blueprints for n/naka called for an open counter between the kitchen and the dining room, as in many Japanese restaurants, where a few lucky diners could sit and be served, kappo style, directly from Nakayama’s hands. When the health department rejected the plan, she installed a pair of traditional shoji screens, set on sliding tracks, which, during service, she keeps closed. “The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it’s better that people can’t see me,” she said. “I’m probably not aggressive enough to be, like, Hey, look, this is who I am, this is what I do, it’s me, me, me.” She went on, “If you don’t look at us, we’re allowed to just be who we are, and what we do comes through so much more easily.”
The evening after my meal at n/naka, I joined Nakayama and Iida for dinner at the Beverly Hills restaurant Matsuhisa, where, three decades ago, Nobu Matsuhisa became a sushi superstar. Neither woman had ever eaten there, though the location loomed large in Iida’s family history. In the eighties, her father, a chef with a sushi counter in Arcadia, opened a second restaurant, in the spot that Matsuhisa now occupies. The expansion, she said, was “that stereotypical story of the chef who wants to build a big name for himself.” Iida’s mother was impatient with the business, which was far from their home. “Being here is a little bit tricky for me,” Iida said, as the three of us sat at Matsuhisa’s twenty-foot-long sushi bar, adding, “I’ve never witnessed the place that caused those problems.” Her father stubbornly stuck it out for years; eventually, he sold his lease to Matsuhisa, and Iida’s parents divorced.
When Matsuhisa opened, in 1987, its Japanese fusion became a sensation among the Hollywood élite. Robert De Niro was so captivated that he convinced the chef to partner with him in a new venture, which became the Nobu empire. Even on a Sunday night, when we visited, Matsuhisa was crammed with people. We were at the far end of the counter: my shoulder was pressed up against a wall, and Iida kept being jostled by the animated gesticulations of a broad man to her right. Nakayama, in the middle, kept her chair pulled back to carve out some space. A platoon of sushi chefs, all men dressed in white, sliced sashimi and rolled maki before us.
Iida ordered in Japanese from one of the chefs—a few pieces of tai (red sea bream) nigiri and a salmon-skin roll. Nakayama and I each had the omakase, which proceeded like a greatest-hits list of the soy-and-sweet dishes that made Matsuhisa’s name, including hamachi with jalapeño and the iconic slab of miso-glazed black cod.
Iida told me that, the first time she visited Nakayama’s home, she noticed an array of Post-it notes stuck on the walls of her office area. Each had the same message: “n/naka,” followed by four hand-drawn stars. The restaurant, which was then a few months old, had not yet received any reviews. Nakayama described the notes as a promise to herself, and also a trial run: a way for her to grow comfortable with the recognition that she hoped was on its way.
Nakayama draws a distinction between success and fame. She speaks warily about culinary celebrity. At Matsuhisa, when I asked for her professional opinion of our meal, she was studiously polite. “Nobu-san has been doing this for so long, and it’s so admirable of him to have brought out this whole vision of Japanese food,” she said. “There isn’t a single restaurant that isn’t trying to copy him. And it’s been so popular, and it’s been so long since he first did it, that—” She gestured at the scallop sashimi with black garlic and kiwi in front of us. “It’s not, like, ‘Wow!’ I mean, it’s ‘wow,’ but it’s not ‘wow.’ ”
A server brought over flutes of Nobu champagne, a private-label brut grand cru. “Nobu has a champagne!” Nakayama cried. “Oh, my God, Carole, we’re so behind!”
Nakayama told me several times that she’s tired of talking about the experience of being a woman chef, but she often brings up the topic. As she and Iida drove me back to my hotel after dinner, they discussed their friend Dominique Crenn, the acclaimed San Francisco chef, who last year became the first woman in America to earn the maximum three Michelin stars for her restaurant, Atelier Crenn. Crenn writes the menus as poems, with each line corresponding to a dish. Both Crenn’s style and n/naka’s have been described as “feminine,” which Nakayama finds absurd.
“At a lot of fine-dining restaurants, the food is so delicate, so small—that’s feminine, right?” she said. She brought up the flagship restaurant of Thomas Keller, where the six top members of the team are all men: “When you look at the food that the French Laundry does, with all the flowery arrangements, it’s so feminine. I don’t see the difference.”
From the back seat, Iida added, “I wonder if people would use the word ‘feminine’ if perhaps you looked different, too. Let’s say she didn’t look like a small Asian woman, but instead was, like, a six-foot-tall, two-hundred-pound Nordic woman. Would they still use that term?”
When Nakayama first met Iida, through OkCupid, she marvelled: Iida was also Japanese-American, had also grown up in Arcadia, and was also—improbably—a sushi chef. They lived five minutes away from each other. Nakayama’s dog was named Sammi; Iida’s was named Sammy. Nakayama felt that her entire life was falling into place.
She had never been open with her parents about her sexual identity. “When I was growing up, and even in my twenties, my mom would say, ‘I hope you’re not weird’—meaning gay,” she told me. Nakayama sees her ambition as, in part, a way of channelling her terror of disappointing the people she was closest to. “I was so afraid to embarrass my family,” she said. “I thought that if I achieve things in the world, and am respected, then people won’t find me shameful. They’ll be proud of me—being gay will just be secondary.”
Even when her relationship with Iida became serious, Nakayama avoided coming out to her mother. (Her father died in 2004.) “I’d never say the words ‘I’m gay.’ I’d say, like, ‘I have a friend! Who lives with me now!’ ” When she and Iida got engaged, she wasn’t sure how to break the news: “I remember telling my mom, ‘I think you should come to Hawaii in August, because Carole and I are going to go through a celebration. Of our friendship.’ She was, like, ‘Are you getting married?’ I said yeah, and then she said, ‘I’m O.K. with it.’ I left her that day in shock. I was crying—all these years of carrying this, and finally to get to this point.” At the wedding, Nakayama’s mother walked her down the aisle.
N/naka is closed to diners on Tuesdays, when the staff prepares for the week’s service. On the Tuesday afternoon following our meal at Matsuhisa, two prep cooks, both young women, were slicing abalone and segmenting satsumas, while a dishwasher cleared a backlog of pots. The restaurant’s pastry chef, Gemma Matsuyama, checked in with Iida about a shopping list for a run to a nearby market. Nakayama chatted with one of her seafood suppliers, who had dropped by to deliver four burly kegani, or horsehair crabs, their strawberry-colored shells covered in spiky whiskers. She meticulously examined the crustaceans, then bundled them into a refrigerator beneath her workstation. When Nakayama was in culinary school, she found that she was too short to reach certain equipment in the kitchen; when designing n/naka, she placed everything at counter height or lower.
Michelin has not ranked Los Angeles restaurants since 2009, when it suspended the city’s guide owing to the “economic environment.” But there have been rumors that its secretive critics may soon resume awarding stars in L.A. Nakayama sometimes jokes with Iida that, if n/naka earns three stars, they can take that as a signal to retire. Her ambition, lately, is less fevered than it used to be. “I’m happy to the point where I worry,” she said. “As a little kid, I used to dream a lot about another life—I think it came from a dissatisfaction with my real life.” She’s talked before about closing n/naka in five years, or maybe when she turns fifty-five, or about serving dinner only one night a week.
Nakayama compared her creative process to playing a game like Candy Crush—each new menu increasing in difficulty and complexity, in a never-ending competition against herself. At n/naka, I watched as the kitchen gradually cleared out, until only Nakayama and Iida remained. They worked side by side, facing the shoji screens that shield the kitchen from the dining room. Snow-crab season had just ended, and the kegani would replace it on the menu, as the centerpiece of a turnip stew. Kegani is sweet, but snow crab is sweeter, and the turnips that Nakayama and Iida had pulled from their garden were slightly more fiery than those from the week before. Nakayama explained later that she would change the stew—more soy sauce in the dashi, a smaller dice for the vegetables—to accommodate these minute differences. “We do what we do, and we’re always thinking, Is this the best?” she said. “I don’t know. We just keep doing it.” ♦
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