Editor’s note: In the Taste of Life series, cooking experts, chefs and others involved in the field of food introduce their special recipes intertwined with their paths in life.

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Inadani is an area in the Shinshu region surrounded by peaks reaching more than 3,000 meters in height. 

Minowamachi in Nagano Prefecture is a town in this valley where Toshiyuki Miura runs Guuut in a former store building of an old folk house built more than a century ago.

At the restaurant whose name means “to be born” in Thai, the 61-year-old chef serves only one group of guests a day. The course menu incorporating local produce such as red soba, mushrooms and fruits is imaginative and features nam-pla he made by maturing crucian carp he cultivated in a paddy field.

He also adopts fermentation techniques that north and northeast Thailand and Inadani have in common.

“Destination restaurants” serving flavors that are only available at that particular place and thus are chosen as destinations of trips are much talked about. Guuut is one such restaurant which discerning gourmets flock to from afar.

Miura grew up in neighboring Ina city. After graduating from high school, he moved to Tokyo and entered the food service industry starting with an Italian restaurant.

After working as managers of a classic bar and a French restaurant, he opened Sadakichi in Roppongi, which served Kyoto-style udon noodles.

“I loved and frequented Manki in the Gion district of Kyoto,” says Miura.

Although he set his mind on offering the noodle shop’s perfect flavor, the concept did not go over well with the bar hoppers who frequented Roppongi’s night life. Perhaps dishes such as “udon with chopped thin deep-fried tofu” were too mundane.

About a year after opening the restaurant, Miura visited Kyoto again. He walked around the streets at night in the snow and dropped in on an eatery where he was in for a surprise.

“The moment I took a sip of the appetizer, my freezing body warmed up so much.”

It was a soup made of kombu kelp stock and white miso.

After returning to Tokyo, he came up with four new seasonal udon noodles.

The winter dish “o-udon (honorific expression of udon) with root vegetables,” offering cooked vegetables originally grown in Kyoto and flavored with only kelp and white miso, became popular.

Miura began offering Japanese cuisine-based original dishes.

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Born in Nagano Prefecture in 1962, Toshiyuki Miura is a proprietor of a Thai restaurant. He opened Sadakichi in Tokyo’s Roppongi in 1998 and after the Great East Japan Earthquake began offering dishes with vegetables cultivated naturally in south Shinshu where his hometown is located. His interest in the food culture based on fermentation from north and northeastern Thailand grew from around 2014 and in 2018, he opened Guuut in Minowamachi, Nagano Prefecture, where he re-creates Thai dishes using Japanese ingredients. He closed Sadakichi in the summer of 2020.

BASIC COOKING METHOD

Main Ingredients (Serves 2)

200 grams udon noodles of your choice, 150 grams Shogoin (short and rounded) daikon radish, 150 grams Kyoto-style carrot, 1 “kyo-age” (Kyoto-style thicker deep-fried tofu), 20 grams water dropwort (seri), 10 grams dried kombu kelp (ma-kombu type), 50 grams white miso, 1 piece of yuzu zest.

1. Cut daikon radish and carrot into sticks. Parboil them in pot with hot water and a pinch of salt. Briefly boil fried tofu to remove oil, drain and cut into thin rectangles. Chop water dropwort into length of 3 cm and immerse in water.

2. To make dashi stock, add 1 liter water and ma-kombu in large pot. Right before pot comes to a boil, remove dried kelp and mix in white miso. Remove about 300 ml of stock into another pot, immerse ingredients other than water dropwort and warm. 

3. Cook noodles, rinse under running water, place in bowl with hot water to warm. Drain hot water, return noodles to bowl and pour white miso stock.

4. Arrange all ingredients on noodles. Twist yuzu zest over bowl to transfer aroma and serve with water dropwort.

About 350 kcal and 2.7 grams salt per portion
(Nutrient calculation by the Nutrition Clinic of Kagawa Nutrition University)

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From The Asahi Shimbun’s Jinsei Reshipi (Life Recipe) column