Authors: Ruth Reichl

Garlic and Sapphires (9 page)

But she was unmoved. Still panting from the exertion of her climb, she sat on the edge of her seat, peered suspiciously down at the long gray menu, and said despairingly, “I find it impossible to pronounce these words.”

“Have some green tea,” I suggested soothingly, certain that the tran quility of the restaurant would soon take effect.

The cool, peaceful aura of Honmura An is so profound that most people reach the top of the stairs and lower their voices, as if entering a temple. The dining room is deceptively spare and artfully devoid of ugliness. The decorationsâa single piece of fruit balanced on a platter or a tangle of branches captured in a bronze bowlâlook more like offerings than ornaments, and even the view seems part of the plan. Seen at an oblique angle, the sidewalk below looks like a scene captured in a glass paperweight, the frantic activity on the street part of some noisier, less serene world. I picked up the smooth black stone my chopsticks were resting upon and caressed its worn surface.

Suddenly, as if the images were being conjured by the stone, I remembered the last time I had seen a room like this one. I had been walking on a hillside in Kyoto when my feet found a little pathway. Feeling my way along it, I passed simple fountains that splashed and gurgled, leading me to a door. Pulling aside a bamboo curtain, I discovered a small room much like this one.

When I sat down on a tatami mat, a waitress wordlessly brought me water in a rough ceramic vessel. I tipped the liquid into my mouth and it was instantly flooded with icy coldness and a deep, ancient flavor, as if the water had come bubbling up from the middle of the earth.

“Soba?” asked the waitress. It was not really a question and she was gone before I could answer. Almost immediately she returned with a lacquered tray holding a bamboo mat covered with short, thin noodles the color of bark. On one side was a dish with scallions, grated radish, and wasabi; on the other, a cup filled with a faintly briny broth. She pointed to the dish with the condiments and mimed dropping them into the broth. Choosing a small speckled quail egg from the bowl on the table, she cracked it into the dish and made a mixing gesture.

Now she picked up imaginary chopsticks, held them over the noodles and swooped them into the broth. Pursing her lips as if she were about to whistle, she inhaled with a surprisingly loud, sucking sound.

I did just as she had shown me, but even after all the theater I was not prepared for the feel of the noodles in my mouth, or the purity of the taste. I had been in Japan for almost a month, but I had never experienced anything like this. The noodles quivered as if they were alive, and leapt into my mouth where they vibrated as if playing inaudible music.

“It takes a magician to make soba,” I explained to Claudia, as I showed her how to eat the noodles. “They are made of buckwheat, which has no gluten. That means that getting them to hold together is an act of will. They say it takes a year to learn to mix the dough, another year to learn to roll it, a third to learn the correct cut. In Japan they like soba because they taste good. But they like them even more because they are difficult to make. You have to understand that if you are going to understand anything about Japanese food.”

“May I please have a fork?” Claudia replied.

The soba at Honmura An were as good as the ones I had eaten in Japan, but their allure was lost on Claudia, who would have been much happier with a plate of pasta primavera. The restaurant's sea urchins were fabulous too: great soft piles of orange roe as succulent and perfumed as hunks of ripe mango. Claudia refused to taste them. She merely shuddered when I offered her raw shrimps, which melted beneath the teeth with the lush generosity of milk chocolate. And eating seaweed salad, she said, was absolutely out of the question.

Given all that, I was not surprised when Claudia was the first to call on the day my review of Honmura An appeared. “Are you mad?” she asked without preamble. “Raving about that miserable little restaurant you took me to? Do you know what they are saying?”

She was happy to enlighten me. “People are scandalized that you have given that little noodle joint three stars. Three stars! They are saying that you will never last.” She paused for a moment and then added her final thought. “And just wait until they realize that the restaurant is on the second floor and lacks such modern amenities as elevators!”

RESTAURANTS

by Ruth Reichl

IN JAPAN an expensive object is prized because of its price. This explains why people actually buy those $100 melons you sometimes see in Tokyo. It also helps explain why all my Japanese friends are so taken with Honmura An. “Very expensive soba?” they ask when they hear of the SoHo noodle parlor. “They must be good.”

They are. The buckwheat noodles known as soba have been eaten in Japan for 400 years. As soba restaurants multiplied, the Japanese urge for perfection set in, and soba masters began competing to see who could make the purest soba. This is not easy. Buckwheat is extremely nutritious, but it resists turning into malleable dough. Ordinary soba noodles are made mostly of wheat: to make pure buckwheat noodles that do not shatter and crack apart requires the hand of a true master. The Japanese say it takes a year just to learn to mix the dough, another year to learn to roll it, a third to learn the correct cut. The soba chefs at Honmura An have clearly put in their time.

Knowing this can put you in the proper spirit. The room will certainly put you in the mood: it is a spare, almost severe, quietly soothing space. It is so peaceful that just walking in the door makes you slow down and lower your voice. Even the air seems purer here, and when you look around, you see that every object has been carefully chosen to harmonize with the rest. From up here on the second floor, you find yourself looking down with amused detachment at the people scurrying along the frantic streets of SoHo.

A good beginning. Then there are warm towels to help you wipe away the outside world, and the perfect drink, cold sake in a cedar box with salt along the edge. The icy alcohol picks up the sweetness of the wood, the salt offsets it, and the flavor of the sake comes singing through, cold and pure.

With the sake I like a little bowl of edamameâfresh soybeansâslightly salted and still in the pod. You pick them up and pop the beans into your mouth. (If you try to eat the pods, you will find that they are rather tough.) At first taste, they are slightly salty, and then the buttery richness of the beans comes through. If you think of soybeans as boring, these will change your mind.

Other appetizers worth trying include tori dango, lightly fried balls of ground chicken that are crisp outside, soft inside and intriguingly flavorful. There are fine small bowls of marinated wild greens and seaweed that give new meaning to the word salad. And iso age: shrimp that are rolled in noodles, topped with prickly leaves of pungent shiso, wrapped in seaweed and deep-fried. There is also tempura, which is good. But nothing is remotely on a par with the noodles.

To really appreciate how fine these noodles are, you must eat them cold. Seiro soba come on a square lacquered tray, the beige noodles arrayed across a bamboo mat. On the side is a bowl of dashi, a dipping sauce made of soy sauce, rice wine, kelp, dried bonito flakes and sugar. In ordinary restaurants this is a salty bore; here it is mellow, rich, slightly smoky and incredibly delicious. Next to it are condimentsâgrated daikon, scallions, wasabiâto mix into the dashi according to your own taste. Now you pick some strands of soba off the mat with your chopsticks, dip them into the dashi, and inhale them as noisily as possible. (Slurping is de rigueur.) The noodles are earthy and elastic, soft and slightly firm to the tooth, and when you dip them into the briny bowl of dashi it is as if land and sea were coming, briefly, together.

You can also order soba with various toppings: seaweed, mushrooms, even giant fried prawns. And you can get them hot, the noodles submerged in a bowl of soup with chicken, seafood or greens floating on the top. In the version called kamonan, the strands of soba luxuriate in an intensely fragrant duck stock, with slices of duck covering the top of the bowl, making this one of the restaurant's more substantial dishes. It is an immensely satisfying bowl of food, but the true soba aficionado eats soba plain and cold, especially in the late fall, when buckwheat is harvested and tastes especially fine.

Honmura An also makes its own extraordinary udon, the fat wheat noodles that, in ordinary noodle shops, are about as exciting as slugs. Not nearly so difficult to make, and therefore not nearly so prized by the true cognoscenti, udon are easy to overlook. But the udon at Honmura An are the best I've ever eaten. Served cold with a sesame dipping sauce, they are so resilient that they seem to snap when you bite into them. Served hot, in the dish called nabeyaki (a staple of cheap noodle shops), they virtually redefine the dish.

You can have dessert here if you insist. On the other hand, if you're still hungry, you could always have another tray of noodles.

HONMURAAN

I had known that many readers would be upset by the review; after nine years of Bryan's frankly French sensibility, three stars to a Japanese soba restaurant was a big change. But I began to notice that Bryan himself seemed offended. Almost overnight his attitude toward me changed.

On my first day at the paper Bryan had come strolling by my desk to tell me how glad he was that I had accepted the job. He was the best-looking man at the paper, and as I watched him walk, I knew that he knew it. His thick gray hair somehow emphasized the boyishness of his face and the lankiness of his body; in any room he would turn heads, and looking at him, I wondered how he had managed to be anonymous.

“I wish you luck,” he'd said, smiling down on me with an avuncular air. “It can be rocky at the beginning, and if there's anything I can do to help, just say the word.”

I had not availed myself of this offer, which may be why he became so

distant. As time went on he grew colder and colder, and before long he stopped talking to me altogether.

“What have I done to offend Bryan?” I asked Carol Shaw. She fiddled with the pencils on her desk, reluctant to meet my eye. “It's not you,” she finally replied, looking up at me. “But Bryan is having a hard time adjusting to ordinary life. He just can't believe that he's turned back into a frog.”

“Excuse me?” I said, not understanding.

“He got used to being the Prince of New York,” she said. “
Sixty Minutes
was on the phone. GÃ©rard Depardieu wanted to play him in the movies. After nine years he thought it was all about him, that the paper was holding him back. When he gave up the beat, he thought the offers would come pouring in.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Le Roi est mort,”
she said, her face crinkling into a smile.
“Vive la Reine.”

“I don't get it,” I said.

“He's not the critic anymore,” she said. “You are. The offers stopped.” Her eyes locked onto mine, and I could see that she was weighing whether or not to say what was on her mind. I stared back, willing her to say it. “It's not your fault,” she said finally, “but he's never going to forgive you. He was a nice man when he was a critic, but he made a stupid move, and now it's too late.”

Carol hesitated again, and I sensed that there was something more she wanted to tell me. I waited for her to continue. She pointed over to the desk where Bryan's head was just visible above the partition of the pod he shared with Frank Prial. “Watch your back,” she said. “And later, when everyone's telling you how
wonderful
you are, don't forget this. Remember that no matter how well you do the job, the power is not yours. It all, every scrap of it, belongs to this institution. You're just a byline. Take a good look. The minute you give up the job, you become a nobody. Like him.”

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