The Japanese have a reputation for obsessive attention to detail, and that is why everything is made better in Japan:
Japanese chefs are now cooking almost every cuisine imaginable, combining fidelity to the original with locally sourced products that complement or replace imports. When they prepare foreign foods, they’re no longer asking themselves how they can make a dish more Japanese—or even more Italian, French or American. Instead they’ve moved on to a more profound and difficult challenge: how to make the whole dining experience better.
As a result of this quest, Japan has become the most culturally cosmopolitan country on Earth, a place where you can lunch at a bistro that serves 22 types of delicious and thoroughly Gallic terrines, shop for Ivy League–style menswear at a store that puts to shame the old-school shops of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and spend the evening sipping rare single malts in a serene space that boasts a collection of 12,000 jazz, blues and soul albums. The best of everything can be found here, and is now often made here: American-style fashion, haute French cuisine, classic cocktails, modern luxury hotels. It might seem perverse for a traveler to Tokyo to skip sukiyaki in favor of Neapolitan pizza, but just wait until he tastes that crust.
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Though many Japanese foodies and critics deride the Michelin Guide for a perceived ignorance of traditional Japanese food culture, the publication of the first Red Guide to Tokyo just four years ago signaled a tectonic shift in the international culinary scene. In the latest guide, 247 of Tokyo’s restaurants have stars—almost four times the number in Paris, and more than the total number in London, New York City and Paris, pointing to the spectacular appeal of this city to foreign palates. (And it’s not just Tokyo: The Kansai region also has more starred restaurants than those foreign cities combined.)
It’s no surprise to see the top ranks of Japan’s Red Guide populated by tiny sushi bars and extravagant kaiseki restaurants, but each year there are also more and more non-Japanese restaurants earning stars for their creative cooking. One of Tokyo’s three-star establishments—an honor awarded to only 15 restaurants in the main cities of Europe but to 16 in Tokyo alone—is Quintessence, which serves contemporary French food created by a young Japanese chef named Shuzo Kishida.
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According to almost every non-Japanese chef I’ve spoken to, Japanese chefs, even those cooking non-Japanese cuisines, are the most highly trained and technically adept in the world. Patrice Martineau, a French chef now in charge of Peter restaurant in the Peninsula Tokyo, put it this way: “I’m living the dream of every French chef I know. I have an entire kitchen staff of Japanese working under me. There’s no one in the world who works harder, faster, better.”
When Japanese chefs finally return home to cook, the restaurant business gives them a kind of auteur status that’s virtually unheard of in the rest of the world. Cesar Ramirez’s Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare, which was recently awarded three Michelin stars, famously seats only 18. But there are hundreds of such tiny non-Japanese restaurants in Tokyo alone, and many thousands more Japanese places.