Dinner at Chiso Kappo costs $100 a person. It’s omakase only, meaning no menu. Omakase dining is about trust: You put yourself
in the chef’s hands, and the chef takes on faith your willingness to
put anything in your mouth. Omakase involves many courses, raw and
cooked, fish, vegetables, et cetera, best eaten across the bar from a
man who becomes your hero. Implied in the pact is that your sense of
adventure will be rewarded with the exquisite, the obscure, that which
is usually saved for speakers of Japanese, for the regulars who’ve
spurned the California roll and earned the love.
I once spent $277.23 on omakase for two at Tojo’s in Vancouver, BC,
the most I personally have ever paid for dinner. The privilege of
expensing meals as a critic may make value an abstraction, but it also
raises the stakes when you’re spending your own money: It’d better be
damn good. I remain overjoyed about emptying my wallet on Tojo’s sushi
bar. Each course was a small revelation, often creative, always
beautiful, sometimes with the challenge of unpinpointable flavors. The
chef—it wasn’t even Tojo; he was out that night—was
taciturn, quietly appreciative of our appreciation. The physical space
was forgettable, but in my memory, it’s bathed in the kind of light
that painters of a certain ilk depict beaming through clouds. The food
was transporting. Lacking a religious experience, my impoverished index
of associations could only go to feeling drugged—the heightened
senses, the weird, secret joy.
At Chiso Kappo, you’re buzzed in at a side door. The place is
unremarkably sleek, but the second-floor location and the intimacy of
only 10 seats, all facing the chef, lend a sense of possibility and
exclusivity. The chef, Taichi Kitamura, trained with Shiro in Belltown;
in 2001, he opened Chiso, a Fremont sushi favorite that’s never
surpassed his master’s reputation. Chiso Kappo is upstairs; here,
Kitamura says he uses some different suppliers, gets some different and
better foodstuffs.
In Japan, Kitamura says, entire restaurants are devoted to eel; he
makes it at Kappo because he wants to eat it. It’s been both steamed
and broiled, and it’s rendered very tender, a whole side of it served
simply, sprinkled with the citrusy peppercorn sansho (a
traditional spice for eel). Kitamura might serve a classic chawan
mushi soup of delicate, balanced bonito broth containing an eggy
custard, matsutake mushrooms, and perfectly cooked seafood, warming and
sustaining. He might take chunks of purest white rock cod, roll them in
rice flour, deep-fry them, and set them in front of you immediately, an
elevated version of fish ‘n’ chips. Or skinny little Japanese cousins
of smelt might get rolled in potato flour and treated likewise, served
whole, like completely tasty fish-French-fries.
All of this is good, but, in truth, it is not great—it feels
more like Japanese comfort food than discrete, amazing episodes in a
once-in-a-lifetime dinner. And Chiso Kappo’s raw fish, too, fails to
astonish. Wild hamachi is buttery-delicious; Yukon River king
salmon is striped with rich fat; uni, just in season, is a
fresh froth. But maguro might be mealy, lackluster. And some
fish in the sashimi course makes another appearance later as
plain-and-simple nigiri, duplication without adornment that,
in context, seems unforgivable. In the turf department,
room-temperature slices of duck with scallion and wasabi are lovely.
But bites of Wagyu beef—seared, presented as a special treat with
oyster mushrooms and a lime to squeeze—were so tough that they
could’ve been chewed until the end of time. The cut: short rib, done a
grave disservice by such brief cooking.
The work of the additional server was, on two occasions, objectively
terrible. Formerly warm hand towels sat crumpled up on the bar for the
majority of one meal; dirty plates lingered through new courses. Two
people, with good sake and a tip, won’t get out of Kappo for
significantly less than $300. To expect refuse to disappear, cups to
magically fill, seems only fair.
In the absence of spectacular food, Kitamura needs to be so
compelling that you’d crawl across broken glass to sit across from him.
He’s not. He’s nice, but he doesn’t inspire supreme confidence. His
presentations can seem thoughtless. The gourmets along the bar (and
they are here, wanting to know everything about their food) have to
press him for more information repeatedly. On one visit, in various
conversations, he said that he doesn’t fish for squid in Elliott Bay in
the middle of the night anymore because he has no one to go with; that
he doesn’t drink; and (not without rue) that his parents never told him
they loved him, that it’s not part of Japanese culture. The atmosphere
is less than partylike, nor is it one of reverent captivation. If
Kitamura inquires anxiously, you don’t want to lie. It’s good, you can
say honestly, still staring at your used hot towel in front of you,
thinking it’s not great and kind of wanting to leave. If the food was
transcendent, all would be forgiven. As it is, your trust is betrayed.
