Yusoku Ryori Mankamerou, a diasporic restaurant experience in Kyoto

Kyoto loves tradition and undeniably has a lot of it. The countless temples on every corner prove the point, but the most potent indicator of tradition`s role in everyday life is that the way residents eat has not been Westernized. Don`t get me wrong, I don`t necessarily find the West to be the reference point and end for any society, but historically, bloody battles have been fought to untie Japan from the wheel of tradition to catch up and catch the West. Even so, Kyoto residents continue to eat traditionally on the floor, in a self-evidently uncomfortable position, at tables that barely fit my Westernized thighs. In 48 hours, I ate 3 times sitting on the floor, the awkward position emphasising in almost every breath that I had probably overdone it with the yakitori the previous days.

The kaiseki menu has roots in Imperial Kyoto, Japan`s capital and the emperor`s seat for over millennia. It began as small plates served before green tea and evolved into a series of stages, with the highest artistic aesthetics, with utensils of different colours and shapes, and a set-up similar to the degustation menu, but in the Japanese manner. The menu has predetermined terms and rules, and creativity is expressed within these limits, with each dish being predetermined in terms of context. I understand it as a culinary competition in which they try to make it difficult for the contestants and ask them to do their best within strict rules, respecting seasonality and localness, to excel.

Yusoku Ryori Mankamerou counts close to 300 years of life and is steeped in tradition, with the wooden building that welcomed us spread around a zen garden, with running water, wooden bridges and stone ornaments, divided into private rooms covered with tatami. You arrive, take off your shoes while you`re still on concrete, put on leather shoes to walk from the wood-floored lobby to the tatami room; and barefoot now, you walk through the entrance with sliding doors and large windows where dinner is served, with your fellow diners sitting on the floor.

The menu follows the format of appetizer-soup-sashimi-supper-appetizer-side dish-grilled fish-cooked fish-rice with pickles-sweet before, of course, green tea. The chef is asked to create within this framework, which changes slightly depending on your version. In more detail, the chef must have after the amuse bouche of freshly chewy porphyry and the delicious geoduck mussel served on three different plates with different shapes and colours in a composition reminiscent of Kandinsky`s study in 3D, a soup. This soup could have anything up to ingredients as long as it stays within the framework of a soup, as in our case, which had thick fish, delicious and gorgeous pale pink sesame tofu, crunchy ostrich leaves and aromatic Japanese pepper, something between mild shitswan and black pepper. Want more examples of kaiseki with localness, freshness and artistic mastery? Fish sashimi presented with a small, round "chaperone" made of spinach that hid a reso for steaming before the dark red, fine basket, decorated with a branch of sakura, meaning cherry blossom, that brought crispy shrimp, fried fish like tiny shrimp, fish tongue dashi, airy cod tempura and Japanese omelette. A feast of seafood. The grilled trout with wasabi sprigs was dry, but the impression was corrected with the juicy cooked sea bass with bamboo roots and wakame seaweed. To finish a lovely, luscious dessert of grapefruit, stunning strawberries, and soft custard-like whipped cream in a veil of transparent, sweet white wine jelly. The definition of sophistication. And as a mignardise, a typical bite of bean pastry is delicately sweet.

The whole experience was a traditional performance, from the room layout and table setup to the waitresses dressed in typical kimonos, but also of intense creativity, with the chef showing his artistic nature with simple but stylistically impeccable dish decorations.

Info: https://mankamerou.com/