Welcome to Umami-Ville.

Population: 1 — me

I had a meal last evening in Kyoto that smacked of umami. It crowned every course served. I was loopy with joy over the number of flavor hits that I experienced during my 90-minute dinner.

I dined at Komuro Tetsuya, a restaurant specializing in oden, a type of nabemono, or hot pot, that is more often enjoyed in the colder months.

Oden features several kinds of broth in which different vegetables, roots, mushrooms, or sea treats are boiled.

Komuro restaurant also bills itself as a place where you can find delicately coated vegetables and meat that are ethereally fried and made crunchy - tempura. Here, biting into tempura’d vegetables is like biting into the wings of a large butterfly. That image may be eco-discordant, but it sure captures how light the fried items at Kamaru are!

Some restaurants that serve oden pride themselves in their decades-old broth, often flavored with dashi, bonito flakes or kelp. In some cases, I have heard of restaurants treating their oden broth as sherry masters relate to their soleras in Spain — where sherry producers add approximately 10% of a new vintage to a barrel containing decades of older, aging sherry; each year they draw off a volume of sherry before topping up the aging mixture with a volume of the newest vintage.

The bar at Komuro sits about 15 people and there are three tables, one of which is nothing more than a flat board laid across two, stacked Asahi beer crates.

Last night was the most extraordinary umami experience I’ve ever had. Each one of the dishes we ordered was prepared in such a way that it produced a universal, forehead-slapping, moment when I asked myself, “How could food ever get any better?!”

To extract umami notes from the roots, vegetables, and seameats served, Komura chefs gussied up their boiled items with flavorful cheeses, soy, or soy-derivatives, sauces, dashi, and even tiny, baby shrimp, each the size of a baby aspirin.

I can’t think of a more imaginative, more original, dinner I’ve had in recent years and I can’t think of a time when I’ve had more exceptional flavor hits in one sitting.

We tried nearly one of everything on the menu and were stuffed by meal’s end; we had multiple cocktails flavored with real fruit and then a beer chaser and the bill still only came to $42 per person for this flavorful feast. More or less what you’d pay for two unexceptional glasses of wine in a restaurant back home, with no flavor-hit and no food.

If you come to Kyoto, make plans to visit this restaurant. You will be overwhelmed. The good news is: they take reservations. The bad news is, you pretty much have to be able to speak Japanese to secure them.

Komura Tetsuya, 26-18 Nishinokyo Shokushi-cho, Nakagyo-ku, Kyoto City, Kyoto 604-8381

Tel: +81-75-823-0069.

After dinner, we walked 3 miles back to our hotel along dark, narrow alleys. Nothing to be afraid of here though — muggings, robberies, and assaults, are virtually unknown in this country.

In fact, people ride their bikes to work here and leave them unlocked all day as everyone knows that no one will steal a bike because if they ever got caught, they would be shamed off the island.

Along the way back to my hotel, I snapped a few images of which I am fond…

More when it happens…..

Jim