Masaharu Morimoto arrived in Chicago a few months ago like a lot of telegenic chefs who decide to launch satellites into the Chicagosphere: with plenty of advance warning.
Maybe this one’s more instructive: Last week I reviewed a new restaurant called Kinmont, which is doing all the right things in terms of serving sustainable seafood in thoughtfully conceived dishes. And yet the kitchen hadn’t been able to execute them consistently well. Japonais by Morimoto is the antithesis of Kinmont, serving with abandon overfished species such as freshwater eel, yellowtail, and, worst of all, bluefin tuna, the irresistible taste of extinction. And it’s serving many of them in outlandish, seemingly obnoxious preparations—many of these extremely well.
Servers like to brag about the rice, which comes into the kitchen brown, then is polished white in-house. It makes all the difference in the world with dishes like a monstrous, tender braised lamb shank resting on a bed of the stuff transformed into a crispy risotto, or a sizzling-hot stone bowl of the grains tossed with raw hamachi, mountain herbs, and spinach, or a bowl of duck confit fried rice topped with a sunny-side up egg.
600 W. Chicago 312-822-9600japonaismorimoto.com
