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Local Expert: Liz Lewis

Liz is a freelance travel, health, and lifestyle writer. Having lived various places in the world (Hawaii, Crete, California, Germany, and Saudi Arabia), Liz now resides in New Zealand.

But living in such a remote location has not stopped Liz from...

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December 27, 2007
Food

The invention of the paper pot

Tucked in a corner-store spot of a St. Heliers residential neighborhood plaza is a little Japanese restaurant called Eiji. It’s an unassuming place. I even drove by it several times when we lived around the block from it and commented to my wife on how unassuming it was. Until one day I looked at the menu.

Pasted onto the inside of the front window were two pages. One was a pretty standard a la carte sushi selection. Rainbow rolls, dragon rolls, veggie rolls, all the usual new-world avant-garde makis. The second was more unusual. It promised a few things seldom found on the typical Japanese restaurant menu. Chawan-mushi for example is a savory custard steamed in chicken broth with small chunks of chicken, shrimp, and shitaki mushroom. There’s also a selection of kushiagi which are lightly battered skewers of lamb, steak, fish, and root vegetables. Most intriguing however, are Eiji’s repertoire of kaminabe—paper pot stews. These are cooked at the table over a small kerosene gel flame in a kind of oregami parchment paper suspended inside a wire-mesh basket. Flavors range from a simple clear  mushroom broth to a thick deep sukiyaki sauce.

Although Eiji-san told me kaminabe was his invention, I suspect perhaps in his limited English vocabulary he meant it was something he introduced to Auckland. Other sources claim it was pioneered by an imperial cook for the emperor. Either way, it’s a culinary experience unique to Eiji and certainly something I haven’t come across anywhere else. This gives Eiji an advantage in a country where your average airport sushi take-out beats the sushi bars in cities where they have to freeze the fish to get it there. Still, food is delicious in this part of the world and a restaurant in Sydney, Melbourne or Auckland must deliver more than exclusivity to stand-out.

Eiji’s kaminabe certainly stands-out when stacked against other cuisines, but this is comparing apples to oranges. You need to take, for example, my friend Melvin’s Japanese restaurant down at the Viaduct and ask what Maya—here from Japan for some OE work experience at Melvin’s for the day shift, and at Eiji for the night shift—asked me: “So which do you like better?”

This was harder to answer than I expected. Lots of places offer the usual assortment of bento, ramen, and sushi, and quite a few places like Melvin’s do a decent job. When I want some tempura and a box of sashimi, I hop over to Melvin’s and am rarely disappointed. Very few however have stretched beyond the usual predictability of what is essentially fast-food. That puzzles me. After all, Japanese cooking isn’t complicated. In fact, like design, it’s on this simplicity that it thrives. Then again, like design, perhaps it’s the elegance in this simplicity that’s hardest to achieve. Which may be the reason why only three places, that I’ll mention very briefly in this review, have succeeded in breaking new frontiers and pose themselves as Eiji’s more appropriate differentiators.

The first is Hashimoto’s kai-seki dinner in Toronto, prepared a week ahead completely from scratch using only the freshest seasonal ingredients. The second is Sala-Sala’s shabu-shabu, in Christchurch of all places, where I celebrated my 35th birthday. The third is the home-made black-sesame ice-cream served at Yuji’s in Vancouver that’s so much fun to eat because it turns your lips and teeth into a deep shade of purple.

Whether Eiji hit the mark was a bit of a toss-up. See, according to another Japanese friend we took there while she was visiting, a place like Eiji wouldn’t exist in Japan. Restaurants normally specialized rather than trying to offer such a disparate selection of dishes. Sushi, kushiagi, and kaminabe are never found on the same menu. It occurred to me then that the dining experience at Eiji depends heavily on what you’re there for and how you order your food.

Eiji had been open for a few weeks when I made my maiden visit. There were two other customers there and they were a bit shy about explaining everything on their menu. So I went for the set-course chalked on the specials black-board. This began with an assortment of fresh sashimi and progressed in flavor with grilled black-cod followed by karage fried chicken, then finally to a pork belly kaminabe that was actually cooked in a clay pot instead of a paper pot.

When I dragged my wife along for the second visit, the place was buzzing. The new waitress initially turned us away in the absence of a reservation, but Eiji-san personally chased us halfway down the street to apologize and tell us he would make a special table for us. Dinner this time was a lighter affair in which we shared two kaminabe along with a side of tofu salad between us.

My preferred way however is to go omakase, which is the practice of asking the chef to make up the course for you. I love being unexpectedly delighted by something I wouldn’t have normally chosen, even more so when it isn’t on the menu. We discovered, for example, aburi salmon—which my wife now asks for every time—when Eiji-san brought it to our table and seared it with a hand flamer. On another occasion we were offered home-made ramen that had been pulled earlier in the day for themselves. They served it in a clear shitaki broth and the noodles were smooth as silk.

In the spectrum of Japanese cuisine, Eiji doesn’t pretend to even come close to some of the delicate morsels you’ll find at a kai-seki restaurant. No paper-thin slices of the freshest seasonal fish. No octopus braised for three days. No apple sorbets boiled, baked, then chilled and reassembled with its peel. But it manages to find a sorely neglected gap somewhere in between.

There’s one little thing that matters less to me than to others. For months now, Eiji’s been plagued by an elusive liquor license that refuses to arrive even though its been approved. In the meantime, it’s a BYOB policy.

Oh, and my answer to Maya, in front of Melvin, with of course some explaining: “Eiji.”
Eiji Japanese Restaurant
64 Waimarie Street, St. Heliers
09-575-2827
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