The best meal I have ever had...

We had a restaurant all to ourselves. The tiny Aronia de Takazawa is a one table restaurant in Tokyo where the chef creates the most complicated, interesting, shocking, and deliberate dishes. Each bite is thoughtfully crafted and each dish has a joke to it. There were seven or eight (or nine) courses, but some courses were just one bite. We had a terrine of 20-something vegetables that looked like a mosaic. Each vegetable was cooked in a different broth. There was one bean and one large crystal of salt on top of the mosaic. The chef placed the terrine on a small spoon/spatula and you put the whole thing in our mouth.






Every course was like this... a little gem that was not only beautiful, but the most delicious thing you have ever eaten. He made white coffee ice cream by soaking coffee beans in milk for three days. He made "volcanic ash" from himalayan salt and a "piece of charcoal" from a potato. Everything looked like something you thought you knew, but turned out to be totally different. It is as if all foods and spices were elements (like carbon etc) and he remade a whole new crazy world using those elements. It was quite easily the best meal I have ever had in my entire life.

Check out the website. www.aroniadetakazawa.com. It is mostly in Japanese, but if you watch the little video and look through the photos you can see his art. And as great as the meal was... it was even better to have a babysitter!