Shigeru Koizumi Pushes The Boundaries Of Japanese Cuisine

Shigeru Koizumi pushes the boundaries of Japanese cuisine with his food at Esora.

- Koh Yuen Lin

It is easy to be blown away by the beauty of Shigeru Koizumi’s food. The cuisine at his modern kappo restaurant Esora – The Lo and Behold group’s first foray into Japanese fine dining, opened last August – expresses not so much the abstruse Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi. In fact, there seems to be a very concerted effort in delivering precise exquisiteness on every plate, and with a certain level of lavishness. Think an assiette of sashimi and sushi pieces presented amid fresh sprigs of tremblingly delicate sakura blooms, artfully placed on a bed of glutinous rice grains stained different shades of pink to resemble the scatter of fallen petals on the ground. Or an arrangement of petits pois and micro-blooms atop a mound of vibrantly green shells, looking as picture fresh as spring.

But there is much more to his cuisine than deliberately evocative plating. Behind each dish is a chef’s pursuit of perfection. This would be common rhetoric, except in the case of-34 year-old Koizumi; he is trying to attain perfection through adopting modernist techniques. So, while his dishes carry with them purity and reverence for nature, quintessential of Japanese cuisine, they are not quite your usual “Japanese food”. Some of the items – like a globule of tomato water enrobed in a gelatine skin; or a candy shell formed in the likeness of an apple, filled with Japanese apple vinegar, fresh apple and apple sorbet, yogurt and citrus espuma – wouldn’t be out of place in a contemporary European restaurant, even.