Defying Tradition

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 year – 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 a 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 a 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.