Blaine's latest

Blaine had an awesome story on A1 last Friday, about a Japanese chef whose restaurant, Ozaki, got a 1-star review in the new Michelin Guide for Japan.

The point is that Tokyo has more Michelin stars than any other city, including NYC and Paris. And the food here is fantastic - superfresh, lovely to look at, and carefully prepared and seasoned. (If you want to see the full list, here it is.)

The side benefit to his reporting: I went to the restaurant with Blaine, his translator Ako, and her husband - and we had a 15 course dinner with probably 20 different kinds of seafood, for $150 each, plus beer and sake. Each course is 2-3 bites and by the end we were stuffed.

Here's the chef, Ichiro Ozaki, who sleeps in an apt at his restaurant 6 nights a week.



This was an extraordinary food experience because we ate so many things I would never dare to try if I weren't sitting at a counter in front of the chef who was serving it me.

Things like: This enormous raw prawn.



First you pull out the tail and eat it, and then you slurp out the turquoise-blue, oceany-tasting slime that's left behind. (I guess that would be prawn guts.) Then you eat the small cubes of tuna with a sprinkle of Japanese lime juice and salt - but no soy sauce because it would overwhelm the gentle flavors.

We also had fritters made of snapping turtle, and turtle soup - how strange to need a toothpick to pry turtle meat from your teeth! Or an abalone, served the half-shell as it's heated over a small flame, which burns the hairs on the shell, not such a friendly smell.

Or raw cod testicles, a question of mind over matter. The chef asked if we'd like to try them, and we said yes - but then stared at this dollop of wavy white flesh. (Sorry, no photo, but I'll try to get one from Blaine.)

Crab, conger eel, and blowfish - the fish that can poison you if it's not prepared properly by a licensed fish guy. And octopus, abalone, and anglerfish. And probably eight kinds of sushi.

Including this unbelievable tuna sushi, which was actually two different types of tuna.

Chef Ozaki scored - that is, cut thin lines on - each slice of tuna so the soy marinade that he painted onto it would seep into the fish. It was masterful.

We felt perfectly fine afterwards - that is, no funny stomach. But I don't think we'll go to a sushi restaurant for a few weeks, at least.