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.’ ”
Tom Harrigan is a certified prosthetist orthotist (CPO) and physical therapist (PT) who specializes in pediatric care at the 
