Hirosaku :: ひろ作

It has been five years since I stepped into Hirosaku / ひろ作? Wow. I've missed its food. I can never quite find anything like it anywhere else outside of Japan. There's something genuine about the small-ness of the outfit and pride in trotting out the food. 

Hirosaku serves all my favorite things ever at lunch. It's a four-course lunch plus a dessert. We weren't sure what was the dessert. Was it like a zunda-an? Without the mochi? Ooof! Whatever. We all ate it up. Chef Satoshi Watanabe and his wife have aged significantly. How many more years will Hirosaku continue on? 

I highly doubt that Chef Watanabe cares that much about any Michelin stars. He still does the cooking at his own pace, and attends to everything on his own. Chef and his wife. It's hard work, and that is exactly what we appreciate. The effort. It's a professional kitchen, yet it's like the chef's cooking for you in a home, presenting you with all the homecooked flavors that's exquisite and nothing like what commercial kitchens offer.

I think my mistake is in not booking a dinner here and only knowing its lunch offerings. While I like it casual, I'd also love to see the extent of the chef's skills in his dinner menu. Lunch is priced now at ¥6,600 per person and dinner is a whopping ten times more at ¥ 59,290 per person. That is a dinner price I would pay. But I simply refuse to pay that price in Singapore for the meal(s) I get at our sushi restaurants. :P

We began with a sunomono of fish paste noodles and egg. I could just eat this in a bigger portion and skip the rest! The sorta raw fish today was unfortunately a tuna tataki with bonito. I have no liking for maguro, but I ate it anyway. There was tempura with all its beautiful batter, and a fish in there. None of us caught what Mrs Watanabe said about the ingredients and we didn't ask. LOLOL It tasted like anago. 

Then the tempura was served. The batter was still so light. I'm not a big fan of tempura, but I can appreciate the quality of the batter. I ate up my portion. It was too beautiful and I wouldn't waste the chef's effort in frying the tempura for us at this perfect timing. I marveled at how strong the chef is to still be able to carry that heavy copper pot filled with boiling oil up and down. 

The simplest dishes have my heart — tai meshi. At least I assumed the white fish used was tai; the skin indicated so. That small bowl of rice and fish was done sooooo beautifully that I could cry. I really wanted to eat a second portion. Mmmmmm.

THEN IT WAS SOBA TIME! I watched the chef boil up the earlier prepped pot of broth, and dip the soba in it. Freshly boiled. I love watching this part. It's like, I can cook soba too and get the timing right, but even with the top quality ingredients, I'll never be able to produce soba broth of this standard. 

The texture of the restaurant's homemade soba hadn't changed. It's soooo consistent. That beautiful Juwari soba (十割蕎麥麵). I love sipping that soba broth at the end that comes with it. It's thick and flavorful. And well, add more shoyu if you want. I like salty. Heh.

This is a meal that stays with me for a loooong time. It's food cooked from the heart that I can't find anywhere else. ごちそうさまでした!

Hirosaku ひろ作
3 Chome-6-13 Shinbashi, Minato City, Tokyo 105-0004
東京都港区新橋3-6-13
T: +81 3-3591-0901
Hours: Mondays to Fridays, Lunch at noon to 2pm, then dinner from 6pm to 8.30pm.
Online reservations in English here.