The evening meal at our Hayato ryokan was so wonderful it does warrant its own post,  The restaurant itself was stunning – what a place this was – creatively decorated with clever dividers to provide private dining areas for guests.  The dividers were made up of old Japanese objets-trouvés – empty cider bottles with marble bottlestops, hand-made paper balloons, old-fashioned cameras, clocks, papier-mâché traditional masks.  It was like an art installation of old childhood memories, many of the things famililar to me from my own Japanese chidhood.  I found it strangely moving – and very attractive too.

 

There were big chunky tables where you could sit to eat, on western-style chairs; tatami cubicles with long low tables hewn out of giant tree trunks, with colourful rustic floor cushions.  The look of the place was just beautiful, with flowers arranged in chunky modern vases here and there, a cinder hearth with wooden benches around it, large glass windows onto the wilderness outside – none of it really possible to capture on camera.

 

We were shown to our own private cubicle, a tatami-matted room at the corner of the building with floor-to-ceiling glass on one side so that we could see all the way out over the river – a wooden sunken pit under the solid wood table, heated, no less, so that we could cosily nestle our feet down in there – and amazing paper cast walls imprinted with antique Japanese wheels and door rivets.

 

The décor paled into insignificance though, once the food arrived.  Makoto san told us that the head chef there, quite young at 39, was trained in a Kyoto kaiseki restaurant.  You could tell.  Shimomura san’s food was exquisite.

 

To begin with, Makoto san brought us a bamboo container with a milky saké from which she poured us each a saucerful, the customary start to a kaiseki meal.  It was sweet, cold, creamy and delicious.  Some milk – another specialty of Kyushu, with its dairy cattle farms – had been added to it.

 

I was so keen to drink it that I missed the opportunity to take a photograph of the attractive container it came in – but the hand-written menus we were each given carried a drawing of it, which you can see here.

 

 

With the milky saké came a bowl of kibinago – a tiny saltwater fish with attractive silver stripes down the side, mixed with tofu whey crumbs and topped with the buds of a local fern like flower.  Alongside it, a bowl of tofu made with yomugi, a local herb dressed with miso and goji berries.

 

 

Makoto san brought us a beautiful hand painted bowl containing a rolled fillet of sea bream wrapped in cherry blossom leaf and served with baby fern fronds, tiny rice crackers and a cherry blossom leaf glaze.  This was fantastically good.

 

 

We decided to have hot saké with our meal for a change.  We chose a dry, savoury one, which was brought in a warmed baked earthenware bottle, and Makoto san offered me the choice of two hand-made ochoko – saké cups – something that is often done so that the guest can drink from a cup they like and that they can admire.  I chose the rougher earthenware, so that Paul got one with a handpainted red seabream – “tai”, in Japanese – which is a symbol of  good luck.  The brush-stroked characters referred to good fortune.

 

 

Makoto san then brought us a beautiful hand-made pottery “basket” containing fresh bonito sashimi, decorated with shiso (perilla) flowers, shredded mooli and chives.  This was eaten with a sesame and yuzu sauce.  This was meltingly delicious, the fish fresh and pert and the sauce giving it a savoury edge that was zingy and earthy at the same time.

 

 

The next bowl to appear before us was made of black lacquer and decorated with gold warabi – baby fern fronds – a spot-on seasonal decoration, Makato san pointed out.  Inside, a soft block of tofu with shiro uo – tiny white baby fish, served with the tips of the ostrich fern or kinome and incredibly soft, tasty wakame seaweed.  All this sat in a delicious pool of crystal clear bonito stock. 

 

 

A red lacquer tray appeared with more local specialties – skewers of the local fresh free-range chicken with shiitake mushrooms and miniature peppers.  The chicken was tasty, firm and about a million miles away from your standard supermarket variety.  With the skewers, some moso takenoko – a local variety of bamboo shoot.  Makoto san said that Kyoto often claimed to be the original home of the bamboo shoot, but in fact, Kagoshima was the true home of bamboo, something not widely known.  Later, we saw the place where bamboo was first grown, in a garden in Kagoshima, when the first seedlings were brought over from China.

 

Next to appear, a slice of a local variety of sushi – the rice mixed with saké dregs, giving it a moist, slightly alcoholic taste, was layered with white seaweed and vinegared white fish, kibinago, fresh prawn, and egg.  It tasted fresh and lively.

 

Following swiftly on, a dish of black pork – our first taste of this local specialty, topped with a broad bean (soramame – a little less floury and fresher-tasting than the British variety) sauce, spinach and a thick slice of daikon (mooli radish) underneath, which had absorbed all the delicious flavour from the stock the pork had been cooked in.

 

A palate freshener served in a bamboo cup – broad strip noodles of agar agar, similar to the tokoroten I ate in Tokyo on our second day there.  The cold broth it sat in was savoury, cold and tangy.  Paul loved this version and ate the lot.

 

A chunky square plate appeared next, with the tenderest, softest slicest of local wagyu beef, served with green and white asparagus spears and a watercress sauce.  Absolutely beautiful.

 

The carbs part of the meal appeared in a clay plot – steamed rice cooked with peas, fern fronds, pepper plant leaves and sliced paper-thin omelette.

  

This was accompanied by a dish of pickles, one variety of which was made from the famed giant daikon radish which grows in the fertile volcanic soil to enormous sizes weighing about 25 kilos.  The miso soup with this was red, Paul’s favourite, and contained paper-thin slices of soft black pork.  Again, just fantastically good.

 

 

Dessert was a scoop of home made vanilla ice cream, a lychee, strawberries and a local specialty, tankan jelly, made with local mikan tangerines (the latter known as satsumas in the UK, presumably because Satsuma is the old name for the Kagoshima region, where this fruit originates from.

 

We raved about the food so much that Makoto san called out the head chef, Shimomura san.  He greeted Paul in solidarity as a fellow chef, and thanked us for our enthusiasm for his food.  Makoto san took a photo of the three of us.

 

Another dinner of memories to dwell on when we are back to eating ramen noodles from Seven Eleven once we move into our rented Tokyo apartment next week.  They’ll be tasty, but it’ll be nothing like the subtle, fine flavours we enjoyed that night in Myoken Ishiharaso.