Pufferfish is notorious for the potentially lethal amounts of poison it contains in its liver and ovaries. While most parts of the fish are edible, pufferfish consumption is tightly controlled in Japan. Plus, it can take years for a chef to obtain a licence for preparing and serving fugu.
At Ningyocho Kimi, however, head chef Miru Odaka has not only mastered the highly difficult skill of safely preparing fugu, but has taken things one step further by devising an elaborate 20-course dinner for ¥45,000 a head, where wild torafugu (tiger pufferfish) is the star of every dish.
Until recently, the fugu specialty restaurants of Torafugu no Kai were open exclusively to members. The opening of Ningyocho Kimi, however, marks the group’s first establishment that is available to the general public. With just eight seats at its counter, this luxury restaurant operates just two nights a week to give adventurous eaters a rare showcase of different parts of the prized pufferfish, from head to tail.
The dinner is a spectacle in and of itself, with chef Odaka presenting diners with the surprisingly hefty torafugu in its freshest form and explaining which sections are used for each dish. Beyond the painstaking process of sourcing fresh, wild torafugu and acquiring the qualifications to prepare the fish, it’s clear that an extraordinary amount of work goes into every individual course.
The first course, for instance, is a light yet fragrant dashi of fugu and matsutake mushroom which requires three hours of careful simmering to extract the subtle flavour of the fish without it becoming pungent. Even the seemingly simple karasumi (cured fish roe) and turnip dish that appears towards the beginning of the meal comes from a producer based in Fukui, where only 100kg of karasumi is made per year after a two to three-year curing process. Even the sashimi course, where the fugu is thinly sliced and served raw, comes with a ponzu (citrus vinegar) that is made in-house just a few hours ahead of service.
In addition to quintessentially Japanese dishes like the golden brown fugu karaage (deep fried fish), the dinner is interspersed with a few unconventional items like the pumpkin potage topped with crispy bits of fried fugu skin in lieu of croutons.
With the intensive training that Japanese chefs must undergo to properly prepare fugu, going out to eat fugu in Tokyo is not as daring as it sounds. That said, this OTT dinner at Ningyocho Kimi makes for an exciting dining experience that you’ll remember for years to come.