At the age of 12 Seijiro Matsumoto began his apprenticeship at a ryotei in Fukuoka, Japan, by wiping individual bamboo leaves in the garden of the private dining club every morning. In return he was given food, a place to sleep, and precious little else. It would be three years before he was permitted to wash the soup pots.
After the bubble burst, Honda and places such as Suntory and Benkay closed. Similarly, in the late 90s, says Zheng, Chinese restaurants were slowly dying “because Thai food was taking over the market. So all the Chinese restaurants started adding sushi bars.” Which is how Matsumoto wound up at Jia’s.
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But Chicagoans failed to flock to Matsumoto en masse, and by early 2006 the partnership had dissolved. The restaurant morphed into the more conventional Chiyo, and Matsumoto took a job at a restaurant owned by Toyota near one of its manufacturing plants in Kentucky.
A cube of cooked daikon came next, served with minced chicken and green ginkgo nuts, followed by a plate of radially arranged slices of cold duck breast marinated in its own stock and dabbed with hot mustard, and then a sandwich of grilled pike eel on spongy yellow cake made from pureed and sieved egg, fish, and shrimp. From there Matusmoto veered sightly out of season with a pyramid of asparagus spears crowned by thick slices of raw scallop in a spicy plum sauce. The final main course was a mirin-and-soy-braised seasonal fish called ayu, fat with roe, atop shredded tamago, shiitake, and rice. A martini glass of sweet red beans and longan finished the meal.
