Seasonal Japanese recipes from designer Takashi Sugimoto’s Tokyo restaurant
- In Shunju: New Japanese Cuisine, Sugimoto presents dishes served in his popular neighbourhood eatery
- The cookbook is categorised by season, with bamboo shoot dishes in spring and mushroom-based meals in autumn
Although I visit the Japanese capital at least twice a year, always eating as much as I can during the short trips, I hadn’t heard of Shunju, “Tokyo’s most famous restaurant”. An online search for “Shunju” and “Takashi Sugimoto” revealed, to my surprise, that Sugimoto was not the restaurant’s chef but a designer who is known for being, among other things, the founder of the Super Potato interiors company.
In the introduction to Shunju: New Japanese Cuisine (2002), Sugimoto writes that he started the restaurant in 1986, in the Mishuku district of Tokyo, for himself. “I wanted a restaurant where my friends and I could wholeheartedly indulge in food and drink. As Shunju was a completely new, and very personal, concept there was no existing restaurant or izakaya (tavern) to take as a role model. Mishuku was an extremely quiet neighborhood – with hardly any street traffic at that time – so Shunju embarked on its journey with a cargo full of uncertainties. However, rumors of a new hidden retreat spread quickly and young designers from different fields began to gather there.”
Given Sugimoto’s background, it is no surprise that he writes in detail about the design aspects of the restaurant (of which there are now several branches), such as the architecture, lighting and flooring, before moving on to the food.
The recipes are categorised by season, which seems natural enough given the Japanese obsession with seasonality. So in spring, there are recipes for several bamboo shoot preparations – grilled bamboo shoots; bamboo shoot rice cooked in a stone pot; deep-fried bamboo shoots with dried bonito flakes – as well as other dishes such as sea eel braised with spring burdock roots; grilled fava beans and new onions; and halfbeak sashimi layered with salted plum sauce. In summer, we get lighter, cooling dishes, such as miniature eggplants and shoots in jellied consomme; sweetfish grilled with sea salt; and fresh bamboo tofu.
In autumn, there are mushroom dishes, such as wild mushroom hotpot; quail stuffed with autumn mushrooms; pine mushroom rice and hot sake and pine mushroom infusion. In winter, Sugimoto gives recipes for heartier dishes, including root vegetable dumpling soup; oxtail hotpot; anglerfish liver and braised daikon with glazed sauce; sticky rice cakes stuffed with sweet yam; and Chinese cabbage with cashew nut sauce.
