In the third or the fourth course of our meal at the newly opened Japanese restaurant Wakai in Bandra, Mumbai, a curious looking sushi makes its way to the table. Unlike a typical sushi, this one is warm, its flavours unlike any other dish on the menu. Could it be, we wonder hesitantly, a pizza?
Chef Parvez Khan, who runs the restaurant, has some experience with Japanese cuisine. Before he started Wakai's first (and now shut-for-shifting) outpost in South Mumbai in 2021, Khan worked at Wasabi. When it opened in 2004, the award-winning Japanese restaurant at Taj Mahal Palace and Hotel, Mumbai was the gold standard (and indeed remains so to this day). Nearly a decade later, Izumi opened on the other side of the creek in Bandra. But except for these two landmarks, when it came to Japanese cuisine, it was largely an open field.
Japanese cuisine is often seen as being exotic. For most of us of a certain vintage, Japanese cuisine was inaccessible. You could have been well into your 30s when you had your first sushi. And even then, your visits to Japanese restaurants would have been restricted to those rare times when your boss picked up the tab.
Much of this has changed over the last few years. The latter part of the 2010s saw sushi being introduced in pan-Asian restaurants. The raw fish in sushi being replaced with vegetarian alternatives may have made some of us cringe, but it also endeared the cuisine to a whole new market.
Pan-Asian restaurants also made the cuisine a tad more affordable. As Chef Parvez would likely agree, the cost of ingredients for a Japanese meal tend to be a lot more than that for pan-Asian fare. A smart pan-Asian restaurant would typically offset that cost by pricing the rest of the menu right.
But perhaps the final push in favour of the cuisine came with the discovery that underneath the foreign-sounding names of dishes, Japanese cuisine doesn’t use vastly dissimilar ingredients to Indian food. All of this, combined with rising disposable income, has contributed to the popularity of the cuisine in India.
For a new generation of chefs such as Parvez who have been through the rigour that comes with heading a kitchen such as Wasabi, this brave new world presents fresh opportunities to get cheeky with the cuisine, experiment, and go down paths where their predecessors would turn up their noses. The pizza-flavoured sushi, a hat-tip to Italian pizzas, is one such instance.
Depending on who you ask, the arrival of dish like this in a fine-dining restaurant can be seen as the end of the authentic Japanese meal experience or the beginning of a new era when a cuisine adapts over geographies.
For the most part, Wakai in Bandra stays loyal to traditional Japanese cuisine - so you can expect a good yaki tori, miso soup, gyoza, and tsukune. But every once in a while, you can expect a (pleasant) surprise with dishes like wasabi cornettoes or the aforementioned Tuscany-inspired sushi.
Purists may dismiss these as sore thumbs on the menu. To me, they represent a moment in time – in the career of a chef, who has stepped away from a kitchen that prides itself on its authenticity and could well be coming into his own, as well as in the life of a cuisine, that is on the cusp of being adopted by and adapted to a culture that is inherently alien from its own.
Over the last several years, multiple cuisines have made their way into the city through posh restaurants with influencers and ‘food writers’ breathlessly announcing said cuisines ‘having a moment’. Often, this moment would correspond to the opening of a single restaurant serving said cuisine, which would then shut in a few short years. Somewhere in the archives of the Internet is a graveyard of poorly aged headlines and cuisines that were having a moment. Spanish, Peruvian, and French are three that immediately come to mind.
Restaurateurs are also trying to make a go of it with Mexican cuisine (that isn’t the kind being served at Cream Centres and New Yorkers of the world), with Rizwan Amlani attempting to elevate the heavily Indianized cuisine to an authentic experience at Mezcalita.
But as far as popularity goes, nothing has come close to Korean food that has K-popped its way out of the clutches of fine-dining restaurants to the streets of Mumbai. It is the equivalent of a pirated copy of a book being sold at traffic lights – the ultimate sign of success.
Japanese cuisine still has some time before it reaches that stage. And my meal at Wakai has all but convinced me that the cuisine’s silent march is only just beginning.
A meal at Wakai costs approximately Rs 3,000 sans alcohol.
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