A world away from dragon rolls and bento boxes, Keiko and Toshi Sakuma's peerless restaurant could change your thinking about Japanese food forever. You could make a meal of Toshi's amberjack, maguro, and tiny firefly squid, but then you'd miss out on chefs Shinichi Aoki and Katsuhiro Yamasaki's traditional kaiseki tasting menu. At a meal in early spring, bamboo shoots, warabi ferns, carrots, seaweed, and fuki (a stalk with the texture of celery and a flavor similar to rhubarb) were each cooked separately and then arranged in a bowl of dashi. Yakimono, the grilled course, included a fillet of ocean trout coated in a paste of sake lees. At $88, the kaiseki menu wasn't cheap, but with seasonally fleeting ingredients captured at their peak it's fair to call it a bargain. (S.H.)
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