From Okinawa to Hokkaido, coaxing the best out of local ingredients through seemingly simple cooking methods is, pretty much, the essence of Japanese cooking. The ingredients vary, but the methodology remains the same.
Now imagine the setting is San Francisco and you have the core precept of chef Sylvan Mishima Brackett’s recently released “Rintaro: Japanese Food from an Izakaya in California.”
Born in Kyoto to a Japanese mother and an American father, Brackett, 48, spent his first year in Japan. The young family then emigrated to the Sierra Nevada foothills, where they constructed a family homestead in a classic Japanese style. Throughout his childhood, family trips back to Japan were biannual affairs.