Haruki Nishimura

I was born in Nishiki — the street in Kyoto that has been a covered food market for 400 years and is known as Kyoto's Kitchen. My family has had a tofu shop on the same street for three generations. Kyoto food is its own category within Japanese cuisine — kaiseki, the formal multi-course tradition, is only part of it. The yudofu (hot tofu) in the temple districts, the tsukemono (pickles) that you buy from the specific vendor in the right part of Nishiki, the obanzai (home cooking) that Kyoto women have been making since the imperial court was here — this is what the city actually eats and almost no visitor finds it.