One hundred years from now, everyone will eat lasers and have hyperintelligent talking dolphins for friends.
Joshua Huston
Union's ethnically perplexing successor.
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Japonessa 1400 First Ave., 971-7979, japonessa.com. 11:30 a.m.–11 p.m. Sun.–Thurs., noon–1 a.m. Fri.–Sat.
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One hundred years from now, traffic jams of flying cars and assholes with jetpacks will make people pine for the good old days of ground-level congestion and assholes with SUVs.
One hundred years from now, everyone will have tiny computers in their heads, which will keep them constantly updated on American Idol rankings and celebrity baby news.
One hundred years from now, a new generation of food writers will still be calling cupcakes, bacon, and offal dead trends. In the meantime, the hottest restaurant of the age will be Captain Spaceship's Tripe Haus and Bacon Cupcakery. The miracle of nanotechnology will allow Captain Spaceship to open franchises in the basement or garage of every home in America, and recent developments in the science of teleportation will allow bacon cupcakes to be beamed directly into your stomach, alleviating us all of the burden of chewing.
There will be no cuisine. Everything—every possible combination of cuisines, of foods from this culture and that—will have been tried. Even the worst failures, the most egomaniacal leaps of illogic and desperation, will get their own pop-up concepts and suffer 15 minutes of ridiculous fame before being cast aside for the Next Big Thing. Clever chefs will have plumbed history and geography, finding ever stranger and rarer ingredients and techniques, until finally they reach a hard, cold bottom of completeness. There will be nothing left to exploit. And like the Jedi upon the destruction of Alderan, foodies everywhere will feel a great disturbance in The Force.
In the boîtes of Los Angeles, Paris, and New York, they will look up from their heritage-breed fried-chicken martinis and plates of Styrofoam packing peanuts in ylang-ylang gelée and feel a sudden chill, wondering what they will possibly brag about tomorrow on their Twitter-pathic brain feeds now that no one will be opening any more new Incan/Age of Enlightenment fusion diners or Atlantean comfort-food bistros. There will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth, but this will pass. Eventually a great silence will come as people realize that for hundreds of years they have been living unwittingly under the tyranny of cuisine—of the driving urge among chefs and food writers and restaurateurs to label every goddamn thing they put on a plate—and that, suddenly, they are free. They may, for the first time in ages, simply eat, unburdened by style or tradition.
It will be the greatest day in the history of food.
The first time anyone mentioned Japonessa to me, they said it was a Japanese/Italian fusion restaurant, and I was excited. Of all the ways to bend history and geography to one's own sick whims, a mashup of Japanese and Italian—two food cultures which have neither touched nor even looked at each other sweetly across a crowded room—had to be the wildest potential culinary screw-job ever. Spaghetti and maguro balls. Veal piccata udon. Mochi tiramisu. I could not wait to go.
But Japonessa is not a Japanese/Italian fusion restaurant. My friend had seen the sign at First and Union and misread it as Japonessa Sushi Cucina. What it actually says is Japonessa Sushi Cocina—"cocina" as in Spanish for kitchen, not Italian.
Japanese/Spanish fusion would mean lots of little plates and bright, sharp flavors; fresh seafood used in simple concert with minimal distractions; potatoes and sausages and grilled meats on the menu's right flank; fish soups, sweet rice, noodles, and dumplings made from unusual proteins; and kicks of spice in the strangest places. It would mean equal weight being placed on the grill and the raw bar. It would mean olives and sake, together at last.
But Japonessa is not really a Japanese/Spanish fusion restaurant either. It is absolutely a Japanese restaurant, with its heavy reliance on noodles, seaweed, sushi, sashimi, and the artful preparation of everything that swims. There are hints of a Spanish tradition dotted here and there throughout the long menu, but these are distant and faint, like the sound of your name spoken in the muddle of a loud and crowded party. Among the first dozen or so plates listed inside the menu's leather fold are oyster shooters (neither Japanese nor Spanish, but modern enough, really, to be either, even with their savory sorbet, san bai zu broth, and quail egg), yellowtail usu, thin-sliced wafers of octopus, ahi tartare, rainbow poke, shrimp tempura, agedashi tofu, and eight-spice tuna tataki served almost like a soup, there is so much sauce.
Reading the board, it seems, at a quick glance, completely Japanese, with vague brushes against modernity and a kind of Pac-Rim conceit. But there is more. The yellowtail comes mounded with pico de gallo and wetted with a chile-and-citrus soy sauce that actually makes it taste more Mexican than Spanish; the ahi tartare (which, really, is French in its basic conception), with an international whirlwind of balsamic soy vinegar, yuzu, and oranges. The octopus is actually listed on the menu as pulpo—a nice nod to its Spanish origins—but then comes dressed in cilantro oil and a roasted tomato-and-lime mignonette, tasting kind of like an octopus taco without the shell, or some failed, midnight notion written down in José Andrés' dream journal but then abandoned in the light of day.
