Shunju: New Japanese Cuisine (Takashi Sugimoto & Marcia Iwatate)

This innovative Japanese cookbook takes you on a tour of the restaurants and philosophy at the forefront of the Japanese cooking revolution. Just as Alice Waters changed the way Americans thought about food, Takashi Sugimoto has revolutionized the act of dining in Japan.

Shunju: New Japanese Cuisine brings you the experience of dining at Tokyo's most innovative and exciting restaurants: Shunju. Everything about these restaurants is unique—their design, decoration, and lighting—but most especially the cuisine. At the Shunju restaurants the menu changes with the seasons and the specials change daily depending on what is available from the market. The chefs choose from hand-picked farmed and wild vegetables that arrive each morning. The food, though quintessentially Japanese, is fresh and innovative, with unexpected touches from other cuisines.

The restaurants' designs are modern, funky, and often quite bizarre. Sugimoto, the famed interior designer, has incorporated such unusual installations as original sidewalk gratings from the London subway and hand plastered mud walls. In this way, the designs represent the new lifestyle philosophy of Japan's urban, cultivated youth: that within the chaotic city of modern design and Japanese food, more value should be placed on nature and time, on the textures of genuine materials, the flavors of natural foods.