Totally Unauthorized

The Food Network was just another struggling cable channel when they started showing re-runs of an odd Japanese show called Iron Chef.  Every week, some chef would be recruited to compete against the “Iron Chef” to see who could turn out the best dinner in exactly one hour–and every dish had to use some secret ingredient which was revealed at the last second.

The luckless chef could choose from amongst four opponents–Iron Chef French, Iron Chef Chinese, Iron Chef Italian and Iron Chef Japanese.  Although a Japanese show, they rarely chose Iron Chef Japanese, because he was just to tough.

That chef, Masahiro Morimoto, eventually left Japan and opened a now famous restaurant in New York, named simply Morimoto.  Just a few months ago, he opened a branch in Napa; Thursday night we were lucky enough to get a reservation.

Morimoto is in a large new building, artfully combining both the coldness and sterility of concrete floors and walls with the warmth of wooden tables.  It manages to be ultra-modern and yet inviting.  The service is excellent–from the minute you walk in the door, you are welcomed, tended to and cosseted.  Our friends had arrived first, the hostess knew where they were instantly and our waitress met us there to lead us to the table.

The menu is vast and varied–and you probably haven’t seen many of the things on it, since most of the items are Chef Morimoto’s own fusion creations.  The house offers a 7 course tasting menu for $110, but we chose instead to simply order many items off the menu and share around the table.  This was not only more fun, it was considerably cheaper, too.

Gail is a carpaccio fiend, so we naturally started with the Australian Wagyu beef carpaccio: paper thin slices of melt-in-your-mouth tender beef seared with hot oil and spiced to perfection.  The next item was the marrow bone–surely not Japanese in origin at all, yet flavored with ginger and Asian spices and crusted with Panko crumbs.  Marrow bones are hard to find in American restaurants, and quite a treat: this one was perfect.

Enormous marrow bone crusted in ginger and Panko

Then we had the calamari salad–perfectly tempura-ed calamari topped with a fresh salad–an entirely new presentation of the standard fried calamari, eliminating the customary mayonnaise based dipping sauce, lightening and freshing the dish immensely.

The sauce returned with the next dish, tempura rock shrimp, which was presented in a dish segmented into 3 bowls–one for the shrimp in wasabi aioli, one for the shrimp in a hot spicy sauce not unlike Buffalo wings, and the third segment with the chef’s re-invention of Ranch dressing.

A couple of weeks ago I posted about the spaghetti carbonara in Lafayette.  Morimoto makes a similar dish, with Japanese noodles and uni (sea urchin roe), also presented with a raw egg yolk to be mixed in.  The two dishes are similar while being totally different, another example of the Chef’s creativity.

Sea Urchin carbonara, Morimoto style

There was more, and the crowning moment of the meal was the rack of lamb.  We’re all familiar with Kobe and Wagyu beef, so tender you barely need a knife, but I’ve never seen lamb that tender and tasty before.  Simply wonderful.

As one would imagine, Morimoto is not cheap–but it’s not unreasonable, either.  Gail and our friends had 3 glasses of wine each, we shared many dishes, tipped generously but not lavishly, and were out for under $100/person, which is not at all exorbitant for a restaurant of this class.  We can’t wait to go back.