Of 24-hour Workdays And Roadside Foraging

Behind the scenes of a four-hands collaboration between Julien Royer and Kenichi Takatsu.

- Koh Yuen Lin

It is 2am, and Julien Royer, standing in the middle of Shimonoseki Fishery Port, is looking weary. The Singapore-based French chef of Odette, which topped the 2019 Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants list, had been jetting from one international engagement to another. A little more than 24 hours ago, he arrived in Singapore from the Netherlands, only to take the red-eye out to Fukuoka. The unrestful flight was followed by two-and-a-halfhours worth of rail and road transfers that finally took him to Shimonoseki, where meetings and tastings have been lined up. Yet the fatigue in his eyes is not just from his punishing schedule.

He has come to the fishery port in search of the premium-quality Japanese seafood that he loves; in search of an adrenalin rush at a fishery port seafood auction; in search of something he has never encountered. But on this whipping cold May night, the market seems empty with just a dozen or so trade buyers bidding in friendly fashion. The catch from the waters around Yamaguchi is a fraction of its usual quantity. He learns that the tides were so suboptimal that there isn’t even an amaebi shrimp in sight – something Royer is seeking out specifically for a dinner he is cooking the next day. He folds his arms and silently watches the men scribble their offers on scraps of paper, in a bidding process conducted in a code foreign to his Japanese interpreter.

A LEAP OF FAITH

If, at this point, Royer is silently wondering what he is doing in Shimonoseki, we too, are intrigued to find out. For, unless you are a history bufffamiliar with the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki that ended the First Sino-Japanese War; a diehard fan of Shinzo Abe, who calls Shimonoseki his home constituency; or a fugu fanatic, (more than 80 per cent of Japan’s puffer fish comes from the city’s ports, giving it the title of Japan’s Fugu Capital), chances are, you would never have heard of this place.