Mizai - Kyoto
This smartphone didn’t see much use during dinner - no photos allowed
Rating: 16/20
Where: Kyoto, Japan
When: Dinner for 2 on 8 May 2023
Cost per Person: Tasting menu 60000 Yen
Accolades: 3 Michelin Stars, Tabelog Silver Award (2023)
Why: Mostly traditional Kaiseki cuisine; bragging rights for having a hard-to-get reservation
Making a reservation at three-Michelin-star restaurants often requires some pre-planning. Many are fully reserved for weeks or months ahead of time, so patience is required. But Kyoto's three-starred Mizai stands out even in this crowd. The famous Kaiseki restaurant is fully reserved for over a year out. So while it's thankfully not impossible to make a reservation, it still requires extraordinary patience. I made my May 2023 reservation in early April 2022 - a full thirteen months ahead of time and when Japan was still closed to foreign visitors. Luckily, these pandemic-era restrictions were lifted during our long wait, allowing us to take a trip to lovely spring-time Kyoto.
Mizai is located at the south-eastern corner of Maruyama Park, and taking a taxi is probably the safest way to avoid any possibility of getting lost in the park. Attendants met us at the border of the park, and led us down a flight of stone stairs to the innocuous looking pavilion that houses the restaurant. There were no signs here except for a lone lantern with the restaurant's name. We were asked to briefly wait outside, and were handed a cup of what was described as a “salt welcome drink”. It wasn't particularly salty - essentially just hot water. Still a nice beverage to have on a chilly evening.
Inside the restaurant is a single dining room with an L-shaped counter that seats about a dozen diners. The chefs prepare the food in an out-of-sight kitchen, and then hand the results to the guests. Dinner for the single seating started at 6pm sharp, so everyone arrived 15-30 minutes prior to that. After waiting for over a year, clearly nobody wanted to risk missing any part of the dinner experience. About a third of the guests were foreign visitors, all conveniently seated together at the short end of the L. The atmosphere during dinner was hushed, there was not too much lively conversation, people were serious about the food. The chef supervised the distribution of the dishes at the other end of the counter, and explained them to his Japanese customers. Two of our servers spoke a little bit of English: sufficient to order drinks, but not enough to get detailed descriptions of what we ate.
Mizai serves only a single fixed tasting menu, but dietary restrictions are taken into account, so that my dining companion received a pescatarian version of the meal. There were extensive sake and wine lists, which oddly enough didn't specify any prices, but their variety more than made up for the lack of a beverage pairing. I had two different sakes at the recommendation of the staff, and both were very good. It might be a good thing to ask for prices though, since the restaurants accepts only cash payments - carrying a thick stack of 10000 yen notes was a requirement for eating here…
After the phone-call-only reservations and cash-only payments, we came to another anachronism: no photos of the food were allowed. (So if you've previously hated the pictures of food in my reviews, then this one is for you.) I can only assume that the no-photo policy, similar to the over-a-year wait time, is meant to create some sort of mystique about the restaurant. In reality, the presentation of the food was fine, but not substantially different from what one would find at other Kaiseki restaurants in Kyoto.
The first course of our dinner consisted of multiple dishes: two soup bowls, a saucer that was covered with leaves and a small vessel with what looked like pickles. We were instructed to eat them in a particular order. First the two soup bowls: one contained a red miso soup with a cube of green tofu that was seasoned with wasabi. This miso soup was delicious and very flavorful, and the tofu nicely spicy. The other bowl contained a small amount of rice, and was a bit of a head-scratcher - the rice's consistency reminded me more of rice pudding (minus the sugar) than of the rice generally found in Japanese cooking. And it had no seasoning whatsoever - sushi rice this was not -, maybe it was meant as a palate cleanser? (17 for the soup.)
Lifting the leaves from the saucer revealed a salad of green beans and shiitake mushrooms that was dressed with a sesame tofu sauce and topped with chopped roasted peanuts. The beans had been cooked to a wonderful consistency, clearly not raw anymore but still possessing a slight bite, whereas the sauce was lovely as well (18 for the salad). Finally, the green vegetables found on the side had been marinated and ended up being too sweet for my taste. In hindsight, they might have been a decent addition to the rice (at most 14 otherwise). On average, the first course was a 17.
Next up was a gigantic sashimi course. It was only the second course of the menu, and we already had a hard time finishing it due to its sheer size. The restaurant actually offered an option to reduce portion sizes (while keeping the price the same, alas), and at this point that seemed like it would have been a good idea. There were at least two big pieces per person each of tai, squid, a squid/sesame combination, smoked bonito, aji, fried tuna skin and three kinds of tuna meat, coming not just from different parts of the fish, but actually from entirely different oceans near Japan. Soy sauce was served in the form of soy sauce jelly cubes, and apart from wasabi, some fish were dressed with radishes and ginger. A ponzu sauce was provided for dipping, as was a salt vinegar sauce meant to be eaten with a sea bream liver. Finally, a small citrus fruit was available for seasoning the fish as well. There was a suggested way for combining the different fish and seasonings, but experimentation was definitely encouraged as well. How was the sashimi? There was quite a range, some better, some worse, maybe 14-19 in rating terms. The tai and squid went wonderfully with the excellent salt vinegar sauce - no soy sauce or wasabi needed here. While half of our squid pieces were wonderfully creamy and almost melted in the mouth, the other half was annoyingly chewy. The tuna was good, but not exceptional. The aji was decent, and the bonito was probably the weakest fish present, not having a particularly distinctive flavor. Well, maybe the tuna skin was even worse - served cold it felt like eating mostly fat. Overall 17, but this is hiding a wide range among the individual components of the course.
Our third course was the traditional clear soup that appears on every Kaiseki menu. Here it was served with hamo (conger eel), some nori and a yuzu flower. Everything (eel, nori, soup) was really light in flavor. There was the distinctive fluffy texture of the eel, and the nori had a mochi-like consistency. Only a nice sour note in the soup, probably from the yuzu, added a distinctive taste. A subtle dish overall, as these kind of soups often tend to be 16.
Maybe a tad untraditionally, we were served a meat course next - usually Kaiseki cuisine would have called for fish instead. Three pieces of sirloin steak were topped with dollops of onion sauce. There were also cold roasted green tomatoes, half of a deep-fried potato, and some herbs dressed as a salad. A honey and pepper sauce for the meat was served on the side. The meat was quite good, but not as fatty as other Japanese beef. The onion and honey/pepper sauces were nice accompaniments, but since the meat was pretty flavorful by itself, they were hardly needed. The roasted tomatoes appeared to be slightly marinated, and their acidity was a good contrast to the beef. The potato was a tad sweet - personally, I'd have preferred a “regular” potato here. Finally, the side salad was fantastic with a very lovely dressing. Overall, this was a very good dish. Not exactly traditional Japanese cuisine maybe, but you can't argue with the result. And the glass of red wine from California that we were offered for this course was a nice addition 18.
The next dish was more Japanese, but also quite unusual. Wasabi sorbet was served with a bamboo shoot paste/sauce. The dish was completed by some jelly and nori underneath, as well as a goji berry and a cracker. The spicy sorbet was nicely balanced by the much tamer sauce 17.
A veritable smorgasbord of bite-size dishes made up the next course. We were told to eat the only warm dish first, a whole lightly tempura’ed aju fish served on a slightly bitter leaf. Fatty and fishy - it “tasted like fish sticks” according to my dining companion 15. What looked like a dumpling crossed with a handbag was a tiny dough box filled with sake lees, and oddly sweet compared to the other bites 14. A sakura shrimp rice cracker was crunchy and lovely 18. Monkfish liver was dressed to be both salty and acidic, nice 17. A slice of duck with mustard was decently juicy 16. A small bowl contained (from top to bottom) warabi vegetables, mountain yams and some tuna. The yams had a great gooey consistency, and this all made for a yummy savory dish 18. A piece of cooked ebi was fine, not great 15. Equally in the “ok” category was a baby green ling fish that was slightly sweet 15. A small glass contained peas with some liquid; this was a delicious way to drink peas, sweet and yummy (a shot of peas as opposed to a pea shoot, I suppose) 17. Daikon pickles could have used a bit more “pickling” 15. Green ling liver and skin were served in a gelee of the fish’s bones 15. Tamago seemed to have some mystery sweet ingredient 14. Sea bream and rice had been wrapped in a leaf and rolled into a cone shape. One had to untie a string wrapped around the leaf - yielding an interesting cross between a handroll and a nigiri. Quite nice, but the herb inside the “nigiri” added some mintiness and sweetness to the fish, which seemed a bit odd 16. Finally, a Japanese vegetable tempura (served hot) was slightly bitter and quite fatty. Just ok 14.
A giant bamboo shoot had been sliced and was served as a “steak” next to dry radish sticks. The texture of these steaks was somewhat watery, not quite like water chestnuts, but going in that direction. The radish was also very light, only the bonito flakes on top added some flavor. Not too exciting 15.
Three more bites came on a single plate. First, a spoon filled with abalone, its liver and seaweed. The abalone by itself was decent with some bite, and the sauce pretty light, but overall this had a slightly too pronounced gamey/fishy taste for me 14. Salmon was served with some vegetables including a fiddlehead fern. Very nice 16. The best of the three were two firefly squid that had been dressed with a mustard sauce and green beans. Nicely spicy with a light fishy flavor 17.
Pickles of eggplant, cucumbers, radishes, and several other vegetables were in the ok to great range. I particularly liked the cucumbers for their freshness and crunchiness, but the other pickles were less impressive 16. Instead of a traditional rice pot, we were served an “okoge” burnt rice soup. The soup contained white rice and some rice that had been burnt quite noticably. Overall, this was surprisingly light in flavor 14.
That concluded the savory courses. Moving to sweeter pastures, a kashiwa mochi was filled with broad beans instead of red beans. The beans were reminiscent of peas in both texture and color, and I thought the mochi was a bit too jiggly in consistency 14. I expected a piece of ginger coated in sugar to be like candied ginger, but this one was still slightly raw inside 15.
Mizai’s version of matcha tea was served next, followed by a three-part fruit dessert presentation. First, a single tasty cherry (not rated). Second, a shiranui orange had been cut open. The bottom had been hollowed out and filled with an orange jelly and some pieces of oranges. The top of the orange was still intact, and we were instructed to squeeze its juice into the bottom half. This all led to a light, lovely fruity dessert 17. Finally, a small bowl full of blood orange jelly was topped with a single blueberry. For my taste, the jelly was too bitter 14.
The grand finale was a fruit salad. According to our server, all desserts combined contained over 70 different kinds of fruit, with this salad making up the majority of them. Think of a fruit, and it was probably in here: grapes, apples, tomatoes, jackfruit, ... I guess this was the dessert version of the multi-ingredient salads offered at Piazza Duomo or La Villa Madie. But while it was enjoyable, it was not as sophisticated as its savory cousins. Nothing really stood out tastewise, and there was no defined progression of flavors or textures 16.
Our last bite was a strawberry sorbet over soy-milk cream. It had a good strawberry flavor, and there was a nice contrast between the fruity sorbet and the creamy base 17.
Overall: Mizai serves reliable Kaiseki cuisine, mostly following the traditional pattern, but not shying away from (gently) pushing the boundaries. Enjoyable, but there weren’t really any amazing standout dishes. For my (non-representative, Western) palate, this was not worth three stars. Add to that an atmosphere that is more formal than at most counter-seating restaurants in Japan, and I probably won’t return in the near future (not that I have a choice given the reservation lead times, I guess) 16.