as the description suggests, shunju is a concept restaurant, architecturally conceived by a professor of space design, and styled by a creative director who dictates the food trend and source all the crockery so you can imagine, cuilinary imagination isn't very high on the agenda. Its attraction to foodies, besides the pseudo zen ambience and styling, is the allegedly direct relation to the food producers and the fisherman, who provides the restaurant with delicious seasonal ingredients picked or caught the same day. A lot of the featured recipes are simple, but to carry them off, one needs fresh Japanese ingredients like seasonal bamboo shoots. And the additional frustrating thing is that cooking method is predominmantly deep frying or open fire cooking, both of which aren;t suitable for domestic kitchens. There are a number of recipes featuring
tofus ie made by oneself to feature different textures and flavours. I wasn't going to grind soy beans so the outcome tasted more or less what came out of my tetra pack. The picture on the cover is . get this, miso on a chunk of philadephia cream cheese , an ingredient that features in several other recipes. I love cream cheese, but i can't help feeling that this is food conceived in the head and not quite from the heart. The overall problem with this book is that the recipes lack heart, and demonstrates that soul in cooking isnt just about sourcing food by jumping on the back to nature bandwagon. I also bought a copy of Kaiseki by the chef who runs the famous Kyoto restaurant. Now that has heart and soul. Sometimes new is just new, there are reasons why fine traditions are treasured and in the jaw dropping beauty and simplicity of the latter's cuisine is a great deal of refinemnt honed over centuries which makes one want to emulate.