The degustation menu: Clockwise from top left: Chicken hearts and liver in miso; Bonito Dashi with Kometsuna Japanese greens; Wasabi leaf, kabu and avocado, cherry tomato salad; Black carrot, Hokkaido Pumpkin and chicken dumplings in dashi broth; Steamed edamame and sweet corn; Fried Chicken and Okara tofu with Japanese leeks; Pickled cucumber, wakame and miso salad; Udon with fried carrot leaves and shrimp; Apricot Mochi with green tea.
Asafumi Yamashita is not your average French vegetable grower. Yamashita can count his current clients on less than two hands — three-starred hands, in fact. A regular day at the Yamashita family household — a Japanese haven on the outskirts of Paris. It was that day when I first tasted the sweetest, juiciest raw corn that had ever passed my lips, and the intriguing texture and flavour of his trademark vegetable, the Kabu — something I describe as in-between a daikon, zucchini and a green apple.
More importantly, chatting with Yamashita that day was when I discovered his personal story. Yamashita first came to Paris 24 years ago. At the time he was a bonsai artist and made a modest living from selling his bonsai trees.
One fateful day, all but one or two of his Bonsai trees were stolen from his property. Left without his valuable assets for the bonsai business, he turned to his other hobby, for which he had natural gift — growing vegetables. With all but a green thumb, a few packets of dried seeds brought from Japan, and a handful of existing plants, he slowly built up his vegetable garden and started supplying local Japanese restaurants in Paris and surrounds with hard-to-find Japanese varieties.
Salad — as fresh as it gets. Wasabi leaves, kabu, avocado, red and yellow cherry tomato. Yamashita and his wife offer a traditional Japanese degustation lunch or dinner nine months of the year on their homestead property in Chapet, 40 kms West of Paris. Yamashita is a modest, simple, yet switched-on, charismatic and passionate character. He personally served the ten guests at our lunch table each course, explaining in detail the produce and ingredients used. Surprisingly, most of the other guests at our table had never before eaten food of this kind — real, home-style Japanese cooking, I mean.
