Brush Stroke

Brush Stroke is slated to open on the northeast corner of West Broadway and Reade Street. It will occupy the first and second floors as well as the basement of a landmark building that formerly housed a paint company. A different concept is planned for each floor. The first floor will be a cozy space serving more freehand or improvisational kappoh-style Japanese food. The second floor will offer a quieter, formal setting and an unadulterated Japanese kaiseki experience. And the basement will be a laid-back lounge serving items like kushiyaki, or Japanese-style skewered grills, and other various finger foods.

Chef Mikami visits a mushroom farm with grower Kenji Iida in Izu, Shizuoka

Kaiseki cuisine is derived from the Japanese tea ceremony and has developed into a formal sequence of 10 to 15 courses representing the seasons or stories behind the seasons. In contrast, kappoh is a restaurant style in which the main--and most exciting--dining space is at the counter bar, directly facing the chefs. In the basement, Bouley is contriving new combinations, like kushiyaki with French or Bouley sauces.

For the new restaurant, Bouley's organization will draw on the skills of executive chef Tadao Mikami, 59, and sous-chef Isao Yamada, 33, of Upstairs at Bouley, who have long impressed Bouley himself, and great chefs from the world, like Spanish chef Ferran Adrià of El Bulli. Tsuji will also send Professor of Japanese Cuisine Masakatsu Takemoto, 36, and Assistant Professor Hiroki Murashima, 34, to contribute their expertise. Mikami says he imagines Brush Stroke in musical terms: "The basement is rock, the first floor is jazz, and the second floor is classical."

At first it was Chinese. Not Japanese. When Yoshiki Tsuji, 43, now the president of Japan's largest culinary school, was still working at an investment firm in New York, he suddenly got a call from David Bouley, 54, who had just opened a restaurant under his own name. "I'm going to Japan, and I just remembered that your family runs a cooking school," said Bouley. "Would it be possible for me to learn to cook Chinese at your school?"

Tsuji had dined at Bouley several times. Its innovative, young French chef, then still in his thirties, had begun to capture the media's attention, and it looked as if he would single-handedly reinvent the whole restaurant scene in New York. But the two had never met in person. Tsuji was still in his mid-twenties, one of the quieter of the restaurant's many patrons. But just before that phone call, they had been introduced to each other at a party. And Bouley remembered.

The Tsuji Culinary School was founded in Abeno, Osaka, in 1960 by Yoshiki's father, the late culinary giant, educator, and encyclopedist Shizuo Tsuji; it has since expanded to eight schools and institutes in Japan and France. When David Bouley visited Osaka for the first time, Yoshiki gave him a tour of the prominent Japanese restaurants in Osaka and Kyoto. That was when Bouley began to be fascinated by the serene taste of authentic Japanese cuisine, which was worlds apart from the sushi and Japanese fare to be found in New York in the late 1980s.

This was also the beginning of a long friendship between Tsuji and Bouley, and the first step toward Brush Stroke, a Japanese restaurant the two are now planning to open in Tribeca, Manhattan. Yet all of this happened long before the boom in Japanese cuisine hit New York and the rest of the world. >