Tags
Chefs, Cuisine, Japanese cuisine, New Restaurants, Restaurant concepts, Westernized, yoshoku, yōshoku
Most people see me as reasonable intelligent individual who has the most experience in bars and the beverage business. That is true… But I have been working more than 25 years in luxury hotels and I learned one thing or the other.
One big thing I have learned: everyone is copying everyone. There are very few concepts which are original.
Another thing: A concept which worked in one place (especially celebrity chef restaurants and or “your celebrity hangout places”) doesn’t necessarily work in another place.
I am a foodie. No – this is an understatement. I am a hyper-foodie. Don’t necessarily eat and cook everything – but I like to absorb everything which is food (and obviously beverage) related.
One trend I have seen basically taking the culinary word by storm is yōshoku cuisine. You might ask: what is yōshoku? It is the Western cuisine in Japan. Now this is another understatement. There are heavy Japanese influences in this cuisine. You have got curries, which are very different as Indian and Thai (…) curries. Then there are things like the hambagu – which is more like a Salisbury steak than a hamburger. Incidentally – Ramen is also a part of Yōshoku (even though it is often no more considered as such). And some typical Japanese pasta dishes, off course the famous sandos (and from them the even more infamous Wagyu Sando) and so on.
Now I do think, that it would be extremely smart to do a fine dining restaurant, based on this cuisine. You have got already enough sushi restaurants – but yōshoku is comforting as it is flexible, delicious and authentic, without getting into hot water, if something is not super “original”.
Obviously it would be difficult to implement a widespread fine dining yōshoku restaurant in Japan – as the Japanese are extremely prone to specialize, it is not what might work in Japan. Most of the dishes are known in Japan to be rather inexpensive – hence opening there would from the start an upstream swim.
But abroad, it would be the smartest choice since Shake Shack franchised internationally…. (or sliced bread – you choose…).
A la carte options of sharing dishes and or individual dishes could exist besides of a yōshoku omakase.
I believe, it is just a cuisine which is under-appreciated on first sight – but could be a massive success (well – you could argue, that it already is – restaurants like Zuma already “mix in” some dishes which are not authentic Japanese).
On another note: As I am German, I would probably even open a German-Chinese restaurant instead – a lot of dishes which I could indulge in when I was young, when my parents went to a “classy” Chinese restaurant, just disappeared in favor of more authentic dishes or “more casual delivery-Chinese dishes”. But this is not necessary an “either or case”.
Yōshoku cuisine is delicious, is fun. It is truly great – and would be great to be base of some new fine dining restaurants…