Rintaro: Food and Stories from a Japanese Izakaya in California (Sylvan Mishima Brackett, Jessica Battilana)

RINTARO, the debut cookbook from one of San Francisco’s most acclaimed restaurants, translates the experience of a Tokyo izakaya to the home kitchen.

Crowd-pleasing foods like curry rice, tonkatsu, and yakitori, eaten most often at lunch counters and in home kitchens, live alongside sashimi, fresh bamboo shoots, and other dishes that are usually considered part of a more elevated Japanese cooking tradition.

Through clear instruction, abundant photography, and utterly delicious recipes, RINTARO demystifies Japanese food for home cooks with over 70 recipes for rice, simmered dishes, homemade udon, and grilled foods.

RINTARO shows a cross section of Japanese food that isn’t usually shown in American cookbooks. The book showcases exciting but simple food that tastes both like Japan and California—not fusion food—but the food that you’d expect if the Bay Area were a region of Japan. With gorgeous photography and special design and production touches, this is a book that will live in the kitchen as well as on the coffee table.

Sylvan Mishima Brackett is the chef/owner of Rintaro in San Francisco, which was named one of Bon Appétit’s Top 10 New Restaurants six months after opening in 2015. Sylvan was born in Kyoto and raised in Northern California. He is the former creative director at Chez Panisse, and trained at Soba Ro in Saitama, and at a Ryotei in Aoyama, Tokyo.

Jessica Battilana is a food writer, recipe developer, and author of Repertoire: All the Recipes You Need (Little Brown, 2018) and the co-author of over six cookbooks.