King of Iron Chef, in-deed!

Hiroyuki Sakai won the Iron Chef tournament and was named King of Iron Chefs. I was very upset when that happened because he beat my favorite Iron Chef Chen Kenichi, now I think I know why... Both Chen-san and Sakai-san are masters of their cuisine, I would say Chen's food is the best Chinese food I've ever had and Sakai's food is the best French food I've ever had. I think the difference is that French food has more depth to the flavors then Chinese food.

In Japanese you would put "-san" on the family name to show a sign of respect. One thing I find interesting is that Chen Kenichi is the only Iron Chef to use the Japanese writing of his name. Japanese (and Chinese) names are always listed last name first so on the paperwork here it is Sakai Hiroyuki but in American it is reversed with first name first. Chen Kenichi is listed that way everywhere...

Anyway, back to the point.. I got to La Rochelle wearing my Mets jacket and the head waiter say it and asked if I was from NY. When I said yes he told me that Sakai's son just graduated from Cornell University and was expected back tonight. He then told me to come with him into the bar for a minute before going into the dinning area, once in the bar he told me he was going to get Sakai so he could come talk to me. :D

The bar area was beautiful, the restaurant is on the 32nd floor of an office building and the view of the city was amazing. The bar was red and had glowing lights shining on it making it look almost neon. Behind the bar they had a glass bar with the bottles on it, that bar had blue neon lights under it. Ordered a glass of wine and they brought me some olives and pastry puffs while they went to get Sakai from the kitchen! He came out with an interpreter but we didn't use him, Sakai speaks English but I guess the interpreter was there in case people couldn't understand his accent. We talked for a few minutes about NY and why I was in Japan, I mentioned how I travel for work and that I was going to Australia in Feb. He and Chen are going to Australia to hold a cooking seminar soon, that would be awesome to go to but it's sooner than Feb. After we talked I got my picture with him, he really is an awesome person and is as friendly as he appears to be.

So, onto the dinning area. The dinning floor manager (Vahid Pishkar) is from Iran and has lived in Tokyo for 20 years, as part of his job at La Rochelle he went to Paris for one year and had to learn basic French. He also speaks fluent Japanese, Iranian and English although he didn't know the English for that blue stuff that grows in Blue Cheese, I told him mold and showed how to spell it..

He came and chatted with me between the first few courses, we talked about George Bush, Barak Obama, 9/11, my job, my travels, his travels, our communal dinners, the Mets, American Baseball, Japanese ballplayers and other various topics.. After a few courses he told me that Sakai's son had just arrived and would like to come to talk to me.. Sakai Shingo graduated from Cornell University in the summer and was planning to stay in America and open a restaurant there but his dad asked him to come home so like any Japanese person would do he came home. We talked about NYC, Upstate NY and cold snowy winters. Apparently it does snow in Japan but nothing like in Upstate NY, he had many days where he ended up sleeping in the library because he didn't want to walk back to his dorm.

So, now in between each course I had either Shingo or Vahid coming over and chatting with me. It was awesome, everyone there was amazing. Shingo actually gave me a few pointers on how to cook foie gras and told me that I really should get ahold of some burdock for cooking for one of our communal dinners, he even told me how to cook it so it is not too tough. Speaking of foie gras, we know it's liver but what I didn't know is there are two kinds. The most common and easier to cook is duck liver, the better but much harder to cook is wild goose. Here is the bad thing about it.. There are "farms" that grow ducks for foie gras, those "farms" lock the duck in a very small cage ala Veal and feed it nothing but corn, ducks can't digest corn correctly so it causes the liver to grow to unusual size and they end up dying of liver failure. The liver that it produces is a tough foie gras which means you can over cook it with no fear of screwing it up. Wild goose as the name suggests are not caged animals, they are fed corn but not enough to cause liver failure which means that when the animals are killed the liver is still healthy. The healthy liver is very hard to cook, the trick is to only pan fry each side for a very short amount of time and then put it in the oven covered with some kind of sauce (he recommends something sweet like black truffle sauce) so that the liver almost steams from the sauce. Again, you have to only cook it for a very short amount of time or else it will get overcooked and be very chewy.

What else did I learn tonight? Japanese written language is a bastardization of Chinese and Latin. There are three different Japanese written character sets. The oldest is Kanji which was based on ancient Chinese. Kanji can't be pronounced, they are symbols to project meaning and based on the placement and arrangement they mean something different. You can't just take a Kanji symbol and translate it to a word or words, you need to translate the whole sentence in order to gain it's meaning. The second written character set is Katakana which was also based on Chinese. Katakana came into being when new things were introduced into the Japanese culture such as tomatoes, forks and spoons. The Katakana is usually a one symbol for one word association, for example there is a katakana symbol that literally means tomato. The third and final is Romaji, Romaji a bastardization of latin letters and is pronounceable. They have letters for sounds so Shinjuku would be three romaji letters, one for shin one for ju and one for ku. With the advent of phones and text messages Japanese people are going away from all three of these methods and instead using western spelling of their words which is why in the last 5 years alot of signs have been changing over to english letters. Six years ago Japan was very much the Japan from Lost in Translation with no understandable signs. Because cell phones cant text Kanji, Katakana or Romaji they needed to put road signs and such in a written character set that people could text.

The concern amongst traditionalists is that Kanji, Katakana and Romaji are all going to be a thing of the past in another 10 years or so and that everything in Japanese will be written out with English characters. Iron Chef Michiba is one of these people which is why everything in his restaurant is written only in Kanji, he apparently won't even use Katakana or Romji because he feels they are the first step in Japan losing it's culture.

Anyway, enough lessons.. Back to dinner.. How good is Sakai's food? When Iron Chef Masahiko Kobe got married they had their wedding and reception at La Rochelle.

Without further ado I bring to you a course by course description. :) The names in " " are the way they are listed on the menu.

Course 1 - "Fruit tomale inside crab with 3 kinds of fresh clams" This dish had a shrimp sitting atop of a tomato, inside the tomato was crab and a sauce made of three different types of clams. The sauce on the outside was a clam/pesto which was amazing!

Course 2 - "Foiegras saute with truffle sauce" Do I really need to say anything about this? Holy shit was it good! It was a large piece of wild goose foie gras over a crispy potato with white asparagus and black truffle sauce!

Course 3 - "Organic vegetable salad with consomme jelle" This was a salad of very fresh vegetables, it included zucchini, corn, asparagus and a few others, it was all wrapped in a cucumber and was on top of a honey sauce. Very nice fresh course to balance out the richness of the foie gras.

Course 4 - "Hokkaido Ezo abalone with hard clam sauce gratin" OK, I'm over my abalone hating officially! There are three different types of abalone, there is Japanese, Australian and American. The Japanese is soft yet firm, it has a little bit of a "crunch" when you bite it but not much of one. The Australian one has no "crunch" and is the softest of them. The American one tends to be "crunchier" and a little harder. There is no definitive answer as to which one is the best, Sakai will only use the Japanese one. Morimoto disagrees and prefers to use the American one because he likes the crunch.. Huh, learn something new every day.. Or in this case lots of things. Oh, my opinion of this? Amazing, the gratin was to die for, I ended up putting the rest of it on my bread! The abalone;s texture was like eating squid, but had more taste than squid does.

Course 5 - "soup" This was a soup made of burdock and some bullion. It was very good and supposedly helps alot with digestion. It tasted alot like Hikama, very earthy.

Course 6 - "Fresh fish from south of Japan" This was a langosteen wrapped in sole cooked in an lobster and crab sauce. It came with a few veggies. This was probably the most disappointing dish, it was great but not as good as the others. I think the lobster and crab sauce reminded me to much of a lobster bisque and that didn't fit right with langosteen and sole.

Course 7 - This was not listed on the menu. After your meal and before dessert they brought a cheese cart by, anything you got off this cart was extra. I got some Sheep Milk Blue Cheese, some beer soaked cheese and some hard cheddar. The cheddar was very good as you would expect, the beer soaked cheese was amazing but the blue cheese stole the show. The blue cheese was so fresh that if you cut a piece and left it on a plate for a few hours the mold would be grown onto the plate! Vahid recommended I eat some with honey and black pepper and holy crap it was so good, I would have never thought of cheese with honey and black pepper but trust me it's worth trying.

Course 8 - "Grand dessert" This was a caramelized peach in a peach and honey sauce with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Yummm..

Course 9 - "cafe" They brought out the coffee with a small plate, the plate had two pieces of home made chocolate, two pieces of sugar candy and one piece of marshmallow. The chocolate was still warm and gooey inside so when they say they made it fresh they meant they JUST made it fresh!

Shall we play the guessing game? I will tell you this one was more than yesterday's meal, but since nobody guessed at that one you don't really have a frame of reference do you.. Come on, I want some guesses.. :)

----
Two other things I wanted to share.. One - There was an opera singer in the lobby of my job today during lunch.. She was good, I listened to one song. Two - I went into a Head Shop on the way to La Rochelle today, everything in there was in English. It was like walking into a normal American Head Shop.

Crap it's late.. I am going to get dressed for bed and then start resizing pics. I might not get them up tonight. If not I will get them first thing in the morning..