Next: Kaiseki (Kyoto) - Good Taste is the Worst Vice

It’s sort of amazing to think that in the past sixteen months – a period when many restaurants might not have changed a single dish on their menus – Next has gone through six iterations.

A meal at Next always has a narrative, whether it’s the high/low of the Thailand menu (street food versus fine dining) or the “come dine in our home” feel of Sicily. Here, the inspiration is Kyoto and the dinner is kaiseki-style, small courses served according to a traditional, formalized progression.

As befits the theme, the tables now have smooth birch wood tops and are decorated with casual arrangements of hay in mismatched vessels. The bright Sicilian pottery has been replaced by Japanese bowls.

To start, there is corn husk tea – brown-gold and clear as a consommé. The flavor is remarkable, and richer than seems possible, with the sweetness of roasted corn and the smokiness of charred husks.

Next there is a cube of chestnut tofu served with garnishes of apples and greens – just a few small bites, but the taste is clearly that of autumn. And so is the aroma, since the hay centerpiece has been briefly set aflame and then left to smolder.

The last of the opening trio of courses is a showstopper, a still life of fall on a lacquered tray. On the menu, it’s simply called Japanese Maple Forest. There’s a candle that looks like a paper lantern, surrounded by fallen foliage and long curls of carrot, with dishes tucked here and there – shrimp with fried heads and legs, lotus root chips perched on a sea urchin shell, a sort of duck proscuitto wrapped around simmered turnip, little dollops of uni mayonnaise in bits of shell, and lemon halves filled with custard and trout roe.

With the season firmly established, we move into the sashimi course, an elegantly spare presentation of madai, salmon, and kampachi, made special with a bit of gold leaf. There is fresh grated wasabi (ever so much more flavorful, and less one-dimensionally hot, than the ubiquitous regular green paste), and dipping sauces of tamari (essentially soy sauce) and shiso emulsion. It’s hard to describe the flavor of shiso – some call it Japanese basil, but that’s not quite right. The best I can say is that it has a sort of grassy astringency.

Another small seafood dish follows, a composition of abalone and cucumber and seaweed and sea grapes, all in a pearly abalone shell. Certainly a lot to taste, even if in miniature scale – I particularly liked the tender chew of the sliced abalone, and the crunch of the sea grapes. There’s abalone liver, too, but I couldn’t pick out its flavor amongst the other elements.

Next, a pair of simmered dishes, warming yet delicate. There is a richly savory maple dashi, with tender anago (ocean eel, my favorite!) and pretty shimeji mushrooms. I found myself lifting the bowl to my lips to sip every last drop. And then, a matsutake mushroom chawanmushi – perfectly smooth custard that’s just as savory as the dashi.

My favorite course of the night? The grilled fish, ayu. Ayu (sweetfish) has a short season in Japan – just the summer into early fall. They’re traditionally threaded onto skewers in a wavy position, as if they are still swimming; I remember seeing whole ayu being grilled this way at a festival in Tokyo. Here, the ayu are filleted, and brought to the table atop a small grill – in the same wavy pose. The fish is remarkable, somehow at once soft and firm, lean and rich.

On the side are the fried heads and bones of the ayu – if I hadn’t known what I was eating, I might have guessed that it was very – very – sharp and crispy potato chips. Not a lot of flavor, really, but a perfect textural contrast to the fish itself.

Most of our pairings were sake, all interesting and different and very good; my favorite was the Mizuho Kuromatsu Kenbishi, a complex sake from a maker founded in 1505. With the ayu, we had Hitochino Nest Nipponia, a beer with a similarly distinguished heritage (it is made with ancient native Japanese barley and hops).

After the ayu comes a small dish of leaves and flowers, comprised of tempura fried eggplant, shiso leaf, and chrysanthemum leaf, and fresh oyster leaf and nasturtium flower. While I love eggplant in any form, this included, I found the fried coating on the leaves to be just a bit too oily for my taste.

The most substantial dish is a soup – not just any soup, of course, but one filled with good things like wagyu beef, carrots, and mushrooms – that signifies the coming of colder weather as autumn turns to winter. Spooned over rice, this is a truly hearty and comforting dish; the tender beef, in particular, has a mouth-coating richness and faint smokiness that recalls the early courses.

There are also some interesting pickled vegetables – so interesting that I’m not totally sure what they were, except that cucumber and broccoli rabe were included.

I was curious to see what Next would proffer for dessert, since a typical Japanese meal might end with something simple like fruit. Indeed, there is fruit – roasted figs with almost savory fried yuba (tofu skin) and soy milk. Personally, I would have preferred fresh figs alone, though I did enjoy the edible maple leaf (Emperor II) that garnished the dish.

The end of the meal brings a bowl of matcha green tea, made in the traditional tea ceremony style so that it is frothy on top. The tea is slightly bitter, so it’s served with a warabimochi, a soft confection of bracken starch (rather than the usual rice) that is coated in toasted soy powder. The sweet nuttiness of the mochi lingers on the palate, along with the memory of the evening.

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