Author interview: Rintaro’s Sylvan Mishima Brackett
We spoke with Sylvan Mishima Brackett, the chef and owner of Rintaro in San Francisco, and the author of Rintaro, to discuss his design process and his inspiration as a chef.
• Your restaurant is consistently hailed as one of San Francisco’s best. What was it like transforming the restaurant recipes for home cooks?
We serve nearly 170 people per night at the restaurant, so the recipes we use at the restaurant make very large batches. The greatest challenge was scaling the recipes for home use. However, I was diligent to include all of the tiny steps and subtle considerations that make a dish special. No secrets left out!
• Before you opened Rintaro, you worked in several incredible restaurants in Portland and the Bay Area, including Chez Panisse. How have those experiences influenced the way you cook?
Aside from my work in restaurants in Japan, I spent most of my early restaurant life at Chez Panisse. I think there is no restaurant in America that has such an extensive network of farmers and ranchers supplying the ingredients. Alice Waters has been one of my great mentors. From her and her team of chefs, I learned that a dish will never be better than the ingredients you start with. I also learned the importance of cultivating relationships with the people who produce your food to find the best ingredients.
• Anyone who has visited Rintaro can see you have an eye for design. How has this inspired the look and feel of the book?
When I first dreamed of opening an izakaya, even before thinking about the food or drink, I wanted to bring a certain vibe from the izakayas I loved in Japan. I wanted someplace lively and fun that it felt like it had been around for decades. I wanted someplace where you could sit with your friends and drink and eat late into the night. Early on, I was also attracted to the illustrations from the matchboxes from prewar Japan that were used to advertise bars, clubs, and restaurants. These illustrations communicated the feeling I was trying to achieve, and we’ve used them extensively in the book.
• You can see the influence of both Japan and California in your restaurant and cookbook, but you’ve said it’s not fusion food. Can you explain?
I think early on I wanted to stay away from the word, “fusion”. It brought to mind the worst ideas from the 80s and 90s adaptations of Asian cuisine and implied a shallow understanding of the cuisines from which they were borrowing. I believe that the soul of Great Japanese cooking is a real consideration of ingredients and the seasons when they are at their best. I happen to be in California, so the ingredients with the most life are ones from here, and we prepare them with techniques I learned from my Japanese mother, Toshiko, and from the chefs I worked with in Japan.
• The recipes in the book represent a cross-section of Japanese food that isn’t usually shown in American cookbooks. What advice do you have for people who are being introduced to your food for the first time through the cookbook?
Although many recipes can be made without specialized Japanese dry ingredients, to really plunge into the book, I would recommend stocking up on a few essentials: good quality soy sauce, mirin, miso, rice vinegar, dried bonito flakes (katsuobushi) and konbu. A decade ago, this would have been difficult, but there are fantastic resources online (Japanese Pantry) and a growing number of Asian grocery stores.
