Shanghai Daily news

Traditional Japanese cuisine gets an unexpected lift from Chef Satoshi Sawada’s surprising innovations. Tina Kanagaratnam tastes some of the dishes.

Chef Satoshi Sawada shows off his innovative Japanese dishes at Shintaro restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel.

A Japanese chef, trained in the European style, working in Bangkok and cooking Japanese cuisine.
You would expect a melange of fusion. But the surprise with Four Seasons Bangkok chef Satoshi Sawada, who is cooking at Shanghai’s Four Seasons Hotel until April 14, is that his cooking is so traditional. Not purely, classically traditional, mind you, but deeply rooted in tradition, and with sprinklings of external influence rather than fusion.
(In fact, don’t even say the “f ” word around chef Sawada; he positively cringes. “Innovation,” he corrects, in gentle Thai-accented English, “not fusion.”)
He’s right – right that his cuisine is not fusion, and right not to go down the fusion route. For as much play as fusion cuisine gets, it fails just as often as it succeeds.
That, and the fact that Japanese cuisine is so highly evolved, has so much going on within it, that to fuse would be to dilute and to dim.
Instead, like an artist who knows exactly what strokes will bring a portrait to life, Chef Sawada’s touches lift traditional Japanese cuisine, brightening it and sharpening it, taking it to places you never thought it could go. (And yet, because it is so grounded in tradition, at the same time, this is a cuisine that also manages to feel as it’s never left home.)
His Toro (tuna belly) Tartar, is topped with a delicate dollop of osetra caviar. The soft, flavorful toro is enhanced by an unusual combination of wasabi and tarragon in a cream sauce. The wasabi bites gently, the tarragon refreshes and the cream sauce is a natural with the soft, almost creamy tuna.
Chef Sawada’s use of Western touches, like the cream sauce and tarragon, harks back to his earliest days in a professional
kitchen: after studying French, Italian, Chinese and Pastry at Shiga Prefectural Kose High School, he began apprenticing in a
Western restaurant: “I cleaned floors and stirred roux,” he says mournfully. Roux, a mixture of butter and flour, is the basis of the cream sauces that underlie traditional French cuisine, and stirring the giant vat of roux in restaurant kitchens is an unenvied, unenviable task usually assigned to the newest cooks.
Chef Sawada obviously perfected the roux, for it shows up again and again: in the Seared Scallop Sushi with Spicy Cream, for example, where, meaty hunks of creamy scallop flesh melting into a spicy sauce, topped with a bit of sunshine: a dab
of kaffir lime sauce, the taste of Thailand.
A zingy orange miso sauce makes a wonderful foil for tender chunks of grilled beef; flavors of lemon and ginger awaken the
freshest yellowtail sashimi, seared with hot oil. Even the sushi plate, the most traditional of the traditional, gets a new lease on life in Chef Sawada’s hands. Roasted eel, that mainstay of the salaryman’s lunchbox, is served here nestled in a rice roll, and wrapped in a thin spring roll skin, the textures of soft rice and fried spring roll skin agreeably juxtaposed; salmon sushi is topped with a luscious egg tartare.
But the best surprise of all comes at the end of the meal: dessert. Not for this chef, trained in European pastry, the usual insipid watermelon-and-honeydew combo that passes for dessert in even the fanciest Japanese restaurants. Chef Sawada, instead
creates Eastern-flavors in Western desserts: Passion fruit custard tart with chocolate, served with honey-ginger ice cream; a
plum trio: plum jelly, plum sherbet and plum compote; warm red bean brownie with black sesame rice ice cream. Once again, tradition – with a twist.

Chef Sawada will be cooking at Shintaro, at the Four Seasons Hotel, until April 14. Dinner only. 500 Weihai Road, Tel: 6256-8888. The “all you can eat” menus begin at RMB 198.