Work Text:
KISEKI || SPRING 2016
Executive Chef: Kuroko Tetsuya.
DRINK. Chai. Hibiscus, saffron, embers, tequila, bourbon. Porthole glass. Five minutes between pours.
(Akashi S. 1998. He was the first person you ever cooked for. A pop-up dinner for his birthday, casual lunches on the weekend, or just whenever he came over to visit, to cheer him up. Intermittently from 1999 to 2004. At first he did most of the cooking, and you helped by picking the ingredients, the pairings, the arrangement. Eventually, despite his better eye for temperature and time and his steady hand, you got better and he got busier, and the roles reversed. Without him, you would have gone to grad school for ancient literature or, failing everything else, become his personal chef. "My loss," he said, when you joked about it. 2005, when you both graduated. He went into investment banking, and you went to culinary school. You were both so busy you didn't see each other for the rest of the year or 2006. Sometime in 2007. When you first started at Teikou, he made a reservation without telling you. Later he told you, "The food was good. You seemed happy," as if he could divine that it was you doing the cooking for his table. February, July, a fly-by for a drink in October, December 2008. Sometimes he would reserve tables there under his name for clients, and Aomine would laugh at your disappointment when only strangers in suits showed up. Only once in 2009, in September after his father died. August 2010, he found you crying alone in your apartment and asked, "Is there something you're not telling me?" You didn't know how to answer, so instead you went into the kitchen, put on an apron, and made him the set menu that Aomine made for you the night he hired you. You didn't eat a bite, and he didn't say anything more. At his house mostly and on occasion in your apartment for 2011. He asked you why you didn't take over Teikou and you told him you could never do it, you could never replace Aomine. Twice in October 2011. One day, he stopped asking and took to considering you from afar, examining you like he was looking for the hairline fracture, like he couldn't believe you were whole. When you met him in 2012, it was mostly at other restaurants or at Kagami's, where it was easier to talk business. January 2013. His face quietly radiant as he sat all alone in KISEKI, the first customer, yourself unnaturally stiff in a waiter's outfit, and Kagami laughing at both of you from the kitchen, the sound loud enough to carry. February, April, his busy period in the summer where you wondered if he even ate, much less ate at KISEKI, August, September. That stretch of months at the end of 2013 where he couldn't even get a table, and you would save him a seat at the bar, where he liked to chat with the head bartender, Mayuzumi. January 2014, at the KISEKI anniversary dinner as your angel investor, and again a few days later as a friend receiving a birthday present. November 2014, after KISEKI became a confirmed hit. He was coming off a deal, he was thinking about quitting his job, he was tired, he wouldn't tell you about it, you didn't know what to do, and you made him his favorite off-menu dessert, stood by him while he spooned frozen, crushed geranium leaves and black sesame paper over lightly sweetened fresh tofu. He told you he was proud of you. You wanted to tell him that his father would have been proud of him too, no matter what he did next, but he had a way of looking through you like glass when you lied. "What's going to happen when you don't need me anymore?" he said. "When you get famous, don't forget me." I'll always need you, you told him. I'll always remember you. You made me who I am. That was probably not a lie.)
BITE. Blood orange sabayon and a slice of hamachi. Yuzu and galangal caviar. Served on a bed of edible flowers, with Sichuan peppercorn pebbles. Eat the flowers first, then the peppercorns. Rest, afterwards, savoring the pain.
(Kise R. An unknown number of times in 2006 and 2007. He was Aomine's friend first. Once or twice, you might have plated his food. Most definitely in January 2008, when Aomine introduced you. "Ah, so you're His Majesty Aomine's food taster," he said, showing all his teeth in a smile. February, May, June, July 2008. He ran a French bakery but was more popular as an occasional model. His shop had been featured in a moderately popular TV series. "You should come by," he told you, waiting with Akashi at the bar for their tables. No, you were more of a savory food kind of guy. August 2008. Aomine complained that he was at Teikou all the time. "Where does he get the money?" Sometimes after closing the three of you would drink private stash whisky until the world was pliable and luminous. "We'll still like you when Teikou makes fuck-you money, won't we, Tetsu," Aomine would say, thudding a fist into Kise's back, and you wondered if Aomine was blind or just unable to see Kise's face. January 2009, when you tried disastrously to date, then not again until April. Other than you, he was the first to notice, in May, but neither of you knew the right words and were left to stare at each other unhappily all through the rest of 2009. If he visited in 2010, you didn't remember. Once or twice in 2011, he admitted in 2014 while drunk, but probably not after August. February 2013, as soon as you were open to the public. March, June, October, December 2013. "He's pretty clingy for someone who's not even your friend," Kagami muttered, and you wished Kagami could hear who he resembled when he growled like that. Often in 2014, less often in 2015. Once, you saw him on a magazine cover, accidentally juxtaposed with a headline about ambiguous loss. It felt like a sign. October 2015. "I meant to come in August," he said. Let's do it next year, you told him, we'll eat together. "Look, hey, what if we started a business together? A cafe. I'd do the baked goods and you could make sandwiches. Wouldn't that be nice? I wouldn't need any of the other stuff, if I had you. How about it?" You knew Kise was lying but his face was so familiar, wearing an expression you remembered from 2008, when Aomine would leave the kitchen and sit with Kise during his meal, the two of them bickering over hand-cut fries, Aomine waving you over the second he spotted you peeking out of the kitchen, Kise seeing you only after you sat down. I can't, you told him, I have Kagami now, and Kise's smile, then, was familiar too. "You know what this reminds me of?" he said. I know, you said, you don't have to tell me. "Everything's gotten so crushing," he sighed. "I'm so exhausted. I miss you. I don't even remember what his food tasted like anymore. I wonder where he went. I'm sorry. Never mind. Don't listen to me." Kise, you said, deeply unhappy. You wondered if you were wearing the same expression you wore in 2010, and you prayed you weren't.)
PLANT. Chilled fiddleheads reclining in stock. To harvest a fiddlehead, you must go out in early spring, when it is still a little cold, and cut them before the frond has opened. The first greens of the spring, they require careful preparation and do not always reward the eater. Garnished with a sprinkle of sesame seeds. Drizzled with white wine, horseradish, shallot sauce. The stock is made from sardines, which play well with no one and ask for no succor. A clean palette, clearing away all doubt, leaving you steady, focused. After that, you are ready for the liturgy of the radishes, each slice sharp and thin, almost transparent. Consider, as you eat them, that radishes are not spicy until crushed. It is with our teeth that we unfurl the flavor.
(Midorima S. In double-blind classroom situations for most of 2005. "You're an odd one, aren't you," he said. "You're not a very good cook." Yes, you told him, you knew. Your talents were elsewhere. He, on the other hand, was liquid with a knife, could reduce a fish to usable parts in mere seconds, was particularly talented with distillations, compotes, sauces. He hated having to move up the ranks, line cook to sous chef to head chef. He just wanted his own restaurant, a place that was wholly his. When you told him you admired him, he said, "Well, why are you cooking?" After hours in June and July of 2006. It was by luck that you were both placed in Teikou for your 15-week externship. He had issues with teamwork, with handling Aomine's orders, with making up for the mistakes of the other line cooks. You had issues with stamina and once almost fainted into a pot of truffled seafood broth. You weren't friends, but he had no one else to complain to, and you liked watching him as he replicated dishes in the semi-dark of his kitchen after work. "I think I finally figured you out," he said once, furrowing his brow as he sliced cucumbers, and you, macerating papayas at his side, said, I'm very straightforward. He laughed, shaking his head, his knife still keeping pace. August 2006, the last test meal at Teikou. "You were the one making the spring vegetables," he said afterwards, the two of you seated at the Teikou bar while your classmate cohort noisily celebrated the end of their externship. You agreed. "I could tell, because it tasted like Aomine, only intensified," he told you. "You've been doing that this whole time. How did you do it?" A few minutes later Aomine pulled you away, so you never asked him what he meant. July 2007, instant noodles and popsicles on his tiny balcony. "It's good you found a reason to cook," he said. What's next, you asked him, because he was two months out of graduation and hadn't stayed at a single place for more than a week. "Maybe this is it," he told you, the popsicle melting down the length of his hand. "I'm not meant for someone else's kitchen, and no one will trust me with my own." But what about your restaurant, you asked, stupidly, and he looked right through you and said, "I don't know." In that moment, you were so desperate to taste it — the food only he could make. He taught you to want that.)
HARVEST. Fava beans and young corn, made into a paste that is dipped around a balloon, flash-frozen to create a hard shell. From the outside it is sturdy, pebbled, like an orange. You could hold it in your hand, but then the illusion of weight would fall away, turn into paste on your fingers. Served all by itself on a white plate, the only food item plated this way at KISEKI. Turn the plate around, one full circle, so you appreciate its impenetrability, its blankness, its lack of context or clues.This is where the heavy-handed dramatics begin. Break it open with a spoon, one strong hit over the head. It bursts open to reveal sweetbreads, braised in pinot noir and black cherry. Dig into the crevice you've made so that the sauce spills out on the plate, sudden, very dark. Draw the flat of your spoon into the sauce, spread it on your plate, like the bloom of a flower. You can even write a name, if you like. But ultimately the sauce is too thin to be anything but reduced wine and sugar. Tiny morsels of morel mushrooms, like imperfections in a diamond, emerge as you keep eating. Bread, you know, used to be another word for morsel. The sweetbreads themselves are tender, still warm. The Italians called them giorelli—jewels. To prepare them for this dish, they were passed through ice overnight so that they disgorged their blood, emerged on the other end pearl-white and thick like whipped cream. Here is where you perversely return them: to ice and to blood. Here is how we all return, to where we began.
(Murasakibara A. Most likely in 2008, when Teikou got its third Michelin star. Once or twice in 2009, you can remember his name on the reservations, and a few more times probably undercover. In the beginning, he didn't taste anything different, but in late summer, it became obvious even to those who weren't looking for it. He was the first to write about it, and you tried to hide the reviews from Aomine, who, it turned out, didn't care. July 2010, under his own name, with another food critic. You dropped by his table in Aomine's stead, asked him how his meal was. "Terrible," he said, and that was it. You made small talk with Himuro, but didn't get very far. March 2013. Kagami read his review of KISEKI out loud with increasing hysteria and irritation, ending with a fifteen-minute rant about how he'd never even tasted Aomine's cooking, how the hell was he supposed to be a copy of something he never tasted? July 2015. When you stopped by his table while he was eating dessert, he asked, "When's the last time you ate at Teikou?" Not since Kagami and I left, you said. "Nijimura's not bad but it won’t be more than one star, if that. I never thought Aomine would be the kind of person to leave the business forever just because his restaurant dropped some stars." It wasn't about the stars, you said. It was about the ability to make food the way you wanted. It's important to me. It was important to Aomine too. "'Was?' Isn't it still important to Aomine?" he asked, and drank the last of his wine with a grin.)
BURN. When it arrives, it is a plate of dust, like crumbled snow. All ash: burnt leeks, black garlic, smoked mussels, roasted buckwheat, pulverized and regrouped, dumped across the plate like a toppled urn. Imagine coming across the remnants of a campfire after a bacchanalia has passed through, how imagined music magnifies the silence, the charred logs suggesting wild bodies churning in the dark. This is a dish you eat with the edge of your fork, always sifting through the wreckage to discover new textures: a smudge of vinaigrette, almost accidental, eggplant puree tucked into the crackled paper of bonito. Keep chewing. When trying to capture an intense flavor, the options are many: to boil something down until it is reduces, to displace the essence in another medium, to concentrate, to pare down, to transfer, stocks, tinctures, bitters. Here, immolation. Nothing burns cleanly. You eat the remains. Imagine your shock, then, to uncover the beef cheeks, sturdy, almost alive at the center. You slice into them, see that they are held together so perfectly, muscle to muscle, tendon to bone. The buccinator muscle allows us to chew, to smile, to whistle, to suckle. Which is the applicable function here? Keep chewing. The beef cheeks were carefully cooked in hay-infused milk, then finished under high heat to achieve a perfect char. When you were a child, you would stand very close to the fire and wonder when one of the flying embers would hit your skin and set you aflame. You remembered the heat most keenly after it was quenched and you were returned to the cold darkness, your face still hot to the touch. In that moment you must have thought you would never be warm again. Keep chewing. There was a man who was tested by the gods. Rather than surrender a dove to a hungry hawk, the man offered his own flesh instead. But the scale used to balance his flesh against the dove's was rigged, and he sliced until his body was gone. Keep chewing. When they burned Joan of Arc, they were afraid of leaving relics. So they burned her alive, then burned the body again, then burned what remained of that, then broke everything down and scattered what was left into the river. That river flowed into the grass, into the hay, into the animals, into the meat, into the crops, into the people, until there was nothing left. Keep chewing.
(Aomine D. June, July, August 2006. The only time he ever cooked for you and you alone was the night he hired you. May 2007. It didn't matter, you liked him best when he was thinking of the next dish, the next meal. 2007, 2008. You were perfect for him, fitting into the palm of his cooking like the worn handle of a favorite knife. He called you his second tongue. He said this was where you were meant to be, a thing only you could do. February 2009. So when you saw him starting to fail, it felt like it was your own body betraying you. His failures demolished you, you who only made sense as an extension of him. "Tetsu," he told you, "I don't know what to do. I have no more ideas. It's like someone pulled the plug, and I'm draining away." Give it time, you told him, just wait. 2009, 2010. "I don't even love it anymore," he said. His hands trembled on the knife. It terrified you. It'll come back, you told him, trust me. August 2010. It never came back.)
MEAT. At this point, your waiter will remove your cutlery. One must eat with their hands. This is the first loss. Lamb ribs, Xinjiang style, grilled and encrusted with cumin, coriander, peppercorn, five spice, paprika. Grief is experienced individually. Not everyone goes through all five stages in order, or even at all. But you did start with denial first and were met with anger. When you were left with just the husk, you denied that emptiness too. Mint and walnut pesto, blackened, left to dry, baked until it is a thin veil that clings to the surface of the meat. The problem was that you found your second chance too early. You were not yet ready for bargaining, yet here it was: a way to start over again. No one could tell you if you were still in denial. Only you knew, you see, of the first loss. With no one to blame you, with no one to forgive you, how could you learn what you did wrong? With no one left to say it was all your fault, with no one left to say it was never your fault, how will you ever know the cause? On the side, endives topped with pickled maitake mushrooms, licorice, cauliflower rice, bound together with marrow. Bring it to your mouth, watch the ingredients spill back onto your plate, messy, imperfect. What you loved most was cataloguing the ways in which the second chance was different. It convinced you that this was not a punishment, but salvation. You believed that this time it would end differently. Pick up the other endive cup, try again. The endives are bitter, the mushrooms sour, and you are comforted by the varieties of discomfort. You can return now to the delicate stack of bone and meat, the grease on your hands and your face, the most straightforward course of the night. Here is when you bring your teeth down on a round seed hiding under your tongue. Sichuan peppercorn, so vicious it makes your eyes water. The taste is familiar, obliterating, sweet despite the pain. Has it been there since the second course, waiting for you to discover it? Reach for another rib so you can inspect whether the spices there are crushed or whole. This is when you realize: There is nothing to return to. You have eaten it all. The bone in your hand is ravaged, bare save for a scrap of fat. You have been here before; you know you must toss it aside. It is only a matter of time before someone will look over and realize that your plate is empty, your hands are empty, you have never had anything but what was given and then taken from you. But how can it all be over when you have yet to find any answers? What is the lesson learned? How do you prevent loss? Maybe, you think, it is best to have never had at all. You have reached benevolence. It is not a stage of grief. It is, perhaps, a stage of enlightenment. This is the truth you have accepted, that you have eaten every course until there is no more left. And so this course too will leave you. This too will be gone. You did not see this loss until it was already upon you. Tuck that knowing under your tongue, roll it up until it is as small as a seed and just as poisonous. Wait for the right moment to bite down. At this point, your waiter will bring you a bowl of water and a clean towel. They will put your hands in the warm water. They will baptize you with lemon juice. They will take away your plate and your bones. And, as an afterthought, they will bring back your unused knife.
(Kagami T. The first time in March 2011, the set menu from the night Aomine hired you. Almost daily from March to August 2011, teaching him how to replicate a flavor he would never taste. By October 2011, both of you were Nijimura's sous chefs, and during those months eating at Teikou was like eating a ghost. 2012, side by side in his kitchen, him planning for KISEKI, you secretly mourning. 2013, 2014, 2015. You were two hands on one body, moving together, a miracle. So it was rare for you to cook alone. You remember the last time, just a few weeks ago, maybe March 2016. He said, "Fuck, this is unexpected. Is something wrong?" Yes, everything. It went wrong in October 2015, August 2010, February 2009, when you realized the one thing only you could do and were reminded of the one thing only you could lose. But, close to tears, you told him, nothing's wrong. Just thought you should have a day off to enjoy yourself.)
AIR. Golden poppy gelato, sweetened with vanilla bean and honey. On your tongue, it fades into memory as soon as it melts, a taste that exists always in the past, never in the present. If asked, one would be unable to give a description of its flavor, could only say that yes, it was eaten. Under the gelato, crushed marshmallow with green strawberries, lemon curd, fennel flower pollen, toasted chamomile. It is the end of the night. The meal is over, the dishes cleared, the kitchen dark. There is nothing left. All the diners have gone. All the tables are empty. Who will you serve next? Everything you touch turns to ash. The honey is bought from a nomadic beekeeper who chose bees that frequent fields that grew strawberries, fennel, chamomile. Take off your clothes. Wash your face, your hands, your mouth. You wanted to taste it so badly, the flavor you could never achieve, the taste of someone else. You are not through with desire. It is presented in an air pack of Assam tea vapor, and when it arrives at the table, you are given a sharp pair of scissors to cut open the plastic and release the scent. Tell yourself that this is how you keep them alive, this is how you share their memory, in each bite. Tell yourself it is better this way.
("A good chef should be merely a shadow. The brighter the food, the dimmer the presence of the chef should be on the plate." Kuroko T., in an interview with GQ, May 2016.)
