On a sunny afternoon in a lush garden outside of central Munich, chef Tohru Nakamura is picking cucumbers — a mix of stubby gourds, knobby Japanese varieties that curl like snakes and inch-long striped cucumbers that look like Lilliputian watermelons.
In his left hand is a bushy bouquet of dark purple aka-jiso (red perilla), cultivated from seeds that his father had secreted in his luggage following a trip to Tokyo. The leaves have a vegetal undertone, with a slightly sharper flavor than their Japanese-grown counterparts; Nakamura plans to use some to flavor pickles and experiment with the rest.
Japanese influences and ingredients are seamlessly interwoven into the refined cuisine he serves at Geisels Werneckhof, the two-Michelin-starred restaurant he runs in the Bavarian capital. Nakamura — whose father is from Japan and mother is from Germany — displays his bicultural heritage to winning effect, in a style that combines Japanese and German traditions in subtle yet surprising ways. The result is a far cry from the stereotype of Asian fusion ("the F-word," Nakamura jokes) that emerged in the 1990s.