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| To bring about a client's happiest feelings is itself the happiest feeling |
gThe most talked about French cuisine by a
famous chef who was trained in Parish
gA small, regional Chinese restaurant run by a coupleh
By reading these two sentences, which of the two do you want to go to?
This time, I would like to contemplate what makes a valuable restaurant in relation
to two restaurants I visited. |
| The other day, a Salon de Kyouka
member in Shizuoka threw a birthday party for me at a well-known Chinese restaurant
called gSei-Ouh in Shimizu Prefecture. At the beginning of the year, I had a
chance to try some Chinese food using traditional herbal medicines at a restaurant
in Akasaka, Tokyo with some Salon de Kyouka members. It was then that one of
them told me that there was a lovely restaurant in Shizuoka, and suggested that
I come and try their food which also used traditional herbal medicines. |
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This restaurant is managed by
the chef, Hitoshi Mochizuki, and his wife with only one wait staff. The restaurant
is small, with a family type atmosphere. Mr. Mochizuki has no flashy resume,
nor working experience at famous restaurants, but works hard and cooks wholeheartedly.
He travels several times a year to Hong Kong in order to get his hands on
the best ingredients, which he carries back home with him. Such a chef came up
with a menu for me, and cooked a course for 8 people. The menu, which no doubt
required a lot of effort and artistic sense to devise, was as follows:
A plate of 6 different kinds of appetizers, herbal chicken soup with dried
scallop and shark fin, prawns steamed in green tea, Japanese beef and vegetable
stir fry with beans and pickled shallots, spareribs in thick Chinese black vinegar
sauce, stir fried yam, steamed fish pickled in Szechwan hot pepper, fried rice
with ginger and five grain rice and tofu with pea sauce.
Just counting the major ones, the ingredients used here
add up to over 40 different kinds. Mr Mochizuki, the chef,
handwrote the names of the different dishes as well as their
medicinal qualities on a piece of paper and gave them out
to us. I couldn't help but be moved by his excellent service.iClick
here for the menu and ingredients.j |
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So, we began to eat. It looked like there was a lot on our plates, but the food
had easy to eat flavors that had me constantly taking my hat off. In particular,
I liked the herbal soup with shark fin, which was exquisite, and definitely good
enough to be in the top three of my soup list. The others were also excited and
said that they'd gnever had soup this good before!h It was like drinking Chinese
herbal medicine because the soup used herbs, but this soup was indescribable
and hard to sum up in a few words. I was lightly shocked by its unique taste.
(Above: Chinese medicinal shark fin soup)
(Below: Medicinal herbs used in the soup) |
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| All of the dishes used a light peanut
oil, so that they are not too heavy on the stomach, but I believe that the real
reason for their good taste lies not in that, but in the gfeelingsh that have
gone into making them. We were energized, because the feelings of the chef and
of the people at that restaurant were invested in the process of cooking and
serving the meals to us. I was convinced that things which have had feelings
invested in them can surprise and make people happy. I would love to visit gSei-Ouh
again, because they provided me with a wonderful time that was much more valuable
than a meal at a famous ename only' restaurant. |
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| cI probably feel so strongly because I have
had a terrible experience at a French restaurant that I will never visit again. |
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| Service that is too insistent ruins an otherwise delicious meal |
It was about 4 years ago. When I visited
Paris for business, my friend recommended me to a French Restaurant, g  h.
I wanted to go to another restaurant, but since that was closed, I asked the
concierge at the hotel I was staying in, the Le Bristol Paris, to make a phone
reservation at g h,
which was famous for always being booked. |
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