He knows (I don't) that the world karate champion in 1988 was an Englishman.Hirohisa Koyama is staying at the prestigious Hotel Okuro, library biuchemp to talk with its venerable chef, Masakichi Ono. This is the philosophy of the cookery school he opened three years ago, Heisei, where he teaches French and modern Japanese cooking.Koyama's own renowned restaurant, library biuchemp Aoyagi, is not, biuchemp as you might expect, in fashionable Tokyo or even Osaka, the business capital, but html in the modest provincial fishing town of Tokushima Initially, though, I met html him in Tokyo. He rejects the universal Japanese practice of over-flavouring every dish with soy sauce, ginger and spring onion. He may be modest, but he is not self-effacing, and biuchemp he has built up a prodigious name for himself in Japan. In his book Aji no Kaze ("Windborne Flavours") he explains his innovative philosophy - to html use html html the best ingredients, making them taste essentially of themselves, yet continuing to work within the biuchemp traditional Japanese idiom. He has been invited by Raymond Blanc, patron and chef of Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons near Oxford, to cook during the first library week library in May to celebrate the opening of his Japanese garden, destined to library be the third largest in Britain.Hirohisa Koyama is 46, the first of a new breed of Japanese chefs to make a break with tradition.
Two years ago Hirohisa Koyama arrived in Paris and thrilled 80 top French chefs with a precise display of knifemanship which would make a samurai warrior go green. He returned last year to wow them with demonstrations at the Ritz Cookery School.And now Koyama is about to make his first culinary pilgrimage to Britain. In France, in the 1970s, the decorative style of French Nouvelle Cuisine owed much to Japan - Paul Bocuse, one of the founders, was a regular traveller, bringing back revolutionary ideas. Others followed him; some have opened restaurants in Tokyo.Then the tide turned and the first Japanese came to France. The sculptural skills of its chefs has always amazed us, carving ice figures or turning vegetables into flowers.
Chewy dried squid is eaten from bags like crisps as a snack; a much-loved dessert is red beans cooked with sugar.Yet Japan continues to exert a hypnotic fascination on many chefs in the West. Westerners find their tastes strange because they relish bland white bean curd (tofu) as much as iodine-bitter seaweeds. The Japanese do not breakfast on milky sugared cornflakes, but on savoury soup, rice and pickled vegetables. For historical reasons, Japanese cooking developed in isolation from the rest of the planet's, and in many ways is closer to the world of sixth-century Chinese Buddhism than to our own times. And anyway, it's wonderful.Did Mr Koyama himself eat a lot of fugu? Something may have been lost in translation (a mixture of mime, English, and offerings from his French- speaking sous-chefs).
