Noriyuki Hamada, Restaurant Yukawatan, Karuizawa Japon (book)

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Noriyuki Hamada, Restaurant Yukawatan, Karuizawa Japan (book) by Chihiro Masui (Author), Noriyuki Hamada (Author), Richard Haughton (Photographs). Bilingual French and Japanese. Glénat Livres, 2014. 352 pages. First edition. Very good condition despite some marks on the cover at the back of the book. Interior like new. Structured cover. Large format 36.1 x 27.7 x 4 cm.

An aesthetic emotion, a taste upheaval, a cultural shock, a technical astonishment… The cuisine of Noriyuki Hamada, chef of the Yukawatan restaurant in Japan, is a gastronomic revelation, which has come to France in 352 pages of splendor.

Wearing a bun like the ancient samurai, Noriyuki Hamada is the chef of the Yukawatan restaurant in Karuizawa, a city in Nagano Prefecture, in the mountains of the main island of the Japanese archipelago.

Bocuse bronze 2013, and the first Japanese winner of these world cooking championships in which Japan has participated for over twenty-five years, he embodies a new culinary era. Mutual fascination and influence link French and Japanese gastronomy: Noriyuki Hamada’s recipes are an impressive and exciting demonstration of this…

Without speaking a word of French (or even English), Chef Hamada masters Escoffier’s techniques and the products of classic French cuisine like no one else. With a meat dish – “The Book of Nature” – he astounded the international jury of the Bocuse d’Or, and some of the most rigorous chefs, such as Régis Marcon, Pascal Barbot and Philippe Mille, praised his mastery and personality.

Noriyuki Hamada applies his virtuosity to showcase the products of a nature that inspires him: that of the Shinshû region. He combines Western cooking methods with Japanese preparation techniques for mind-blowing recipes. This “mutant” of cuisine knows how to do everything, but he expresses himself with an incomparable identity. One telling detail: he, who was born in a port, only works with fish from the lakes and rivers of his region!

It is through a book that chef Hamada and the Bleston Court hotel, where the Yukawatan restaurant is nestled, have chosen to conquer France. No one better than Chihiro Masui, a Japanese author living in France and an expert in international haute cuisine, could testify to the revelation that is Noriyuki Hamada’s cuisine. Together, they have put together a book expressing the five flavors of cuisine, the five foundations of taste: salty, sweet, sour, bitter and umami, whose name simply expresses the “taste of what is good.”

Feel free to check out the additional photos at the top left, thank you!

If you prefer to pay in euros, =before= you start ordering, you must click on the word “Français” in orange, under the main photo above, which will redirect you to the same description in French and payment in Euros.