The city of Iwaki, on the coast of Fukushima Prefecture, is not renowned as a destination for leisure or tourism. Yes, it does have some excellent and historic hot springs, but the modern city has developed out of mining, industry and shipping.
And yet, for a chef, Iwaki enjoys a close-to-ideal location.
Here in the Joban region, summers are mild, and winters are never too cold. Inland, there are fertile agricultural flatlands and forested mountains. Offshore, this is where the warm Kuroshio current from the south meets the Arctic waters of the Oyashio current, forming some of the richest fishing grounds in the country.
For chef Harutomo Hagi, Iwaki is more than just his home, the place where he was born and raised. It is the source and inspiration of his cuisine. He has lived and worked there continuously since returning some 24 years ago from his training at the Tsuji Culinary Institute in Tokyo and a stint of hands-on kitchen experience in France.
Destination dining
Hagi’s self-named restaurant occupies a freestanding house on the edge of the town, looking out onto trees and glimpses of the uplands beyond. The attractive, white-plastered facade and wood-beamed dining room give it an old-school European gravitas.
These days, Hagi’s reputation has spread well beyond his hometown and the Tohoku region of northeastern Japan. Diners now make their way up from Tokyo, some two hours away by car or express train (the shinkansen line is further inland and does not run through Iwaki) to explore Hagi’s innovative and exclusive tasting menus.
But it was not always this way. In the early days, the restaurant — at that time named Bellecoeur — was popular for its affordable prix fixe dinner menus at just ¥5,000 a head. To draw in local customers, Hagi’s focus was on his bottom line: Provenance and quality were important but secondary considerations.
Confronting catastrophe
Everything changed with the triple disaster of March 11, 2011. First came the massive, shuddering, seemingly never-ending temblor; next, the unstoppable tsunami that surged up from the ocean; and then the fearsome, invisible jeopardy of radiation from the crippled Fukushima No.1 nuclear power plant some 40 kilometers to the north.
In Iwaki, 468 people died, and close to 100,000 buildings suffered total or partial destruction. Hagi’s restaurant was far enough inland and on sufficiently solid ground that it survived. And thanks to a providential change in wind direction a couple of days after the quake, the nuclear fallout was for the most part blown out to sea.
But there was no escaping the inevitable fourth impact: Hagi had no business. And it was just as bad for Fukushima’s fishermen and farmers. Seafood and agricultural products could not be sold (let alone exported) until they could be tested for safety.
Discovering peak flavor
With no customers and time on his hands, Hagi found himself hanging out with local farmers, deepening his understanding of how they grew the produce that he bought from them. He says it all started with a delivery of tomatoes from one of his nearby suppliers, Nagatoshi Shiraishi.
"In the early summer (of 2011), I received a case of tomatoes from Shiraishi Farm and I was amazed by their taste," Hagi recalls. "When I asked him what his secret was, he just replied, 'I grow them the natural way — in the middle of the weeds.' I was shocked: I realized I knew nothing about natural farming or the ingredients I was getting from him."
Hagi says that helping in the fields and observing the cycle of the vegetables as they grew was more than an education — it was a revelation. It made him reevaluate the way he used vegetables in his cooking. He was determined to work more closely with his suppliers to ensure he received their produce at the very peak of freshness, so he could serve it at the very peak of its flavor.
Besides giving the ingredients greater prominence on the menu, Hagi says he also began changing the way he worked with them.
"If you have good ingredients, they taste great just the way they are," he explains. "You don’t need to do much to them. My cuisine was already very seasonal, but I started to think outside the bounds of purely French cuisine."
A fresh start
When the time came for Hagi to reopen the restaurant in August 2011, he had some big changes to announce. It had a new approach and a new name: Hagi. In place of the old menu, he introduced a multi-course omakase chef’s menu at close to four times the price (currently around ¥20,000 all in). And, initially, he would only accommodate one group per evening (this has since been expanded to a maximum of eight diners).
Hagi’s rationale for making this change was that he wanted to build the menu around the finest products available to him locally. These days, over 90% of his ingredients come from within a one-hour drive from the restaurant.
But this was not solely for his own customers’ benefit. His secondary aim was to generate publicity and draw widespread attention to the quality — and safety — of Fukushima foods.
Another new feature of Hagi’s cuisine is his embrace of wood-fire cooking. His open kitchen boasts an impressive cast-iron fire pit, which he fires up from the neatly stacked wood lined up along the restaurant’s exterior walls. For the customers, it adds theater to the meal, watching the flames leaping up from time to time as he throws on fresh rice straw. For Hagi, it adds an important extra element to his dishes.
“It may look dramatic (compared to gas or electricity) but wood fire gives a gentle heat," he says. "It doesn’t remove the moisture of the ingredients in the same way."
Flavor from the field
These days, Hagi’s omakase dinner comprises about a dozen dishes, closely following the seasons and always presenting local produce front and center. Besides listing the ingredients used in each dish, the menu also spotlights all the restaurant’s "important partners" — the suppliers.
For one of his spring appetizers, Hagi takes new-season onions that are dug and delivered directly from the farm, cooking them over his wood fire for an hour until fully softened. He then creams them to a smooth, white puree which he tops with the beautiful bright yellow roe of freshwater char.
Another fish that Hagi likes to work with is mehikari (greeneyes). Commonly found in the ocean depths off the coast of Fukushima, it is considered the official fish of Iwaki City. He fillets and sears them lightly, pairing them with a sauce prepared from sake lees and foraged edible wild plants, such as the gently bitter young leaves of the koshiabura tree.
Often, a dish may be as simple and memorable as fresh peas served entirely unadorned. Plucked and podded that same morning, they are briefly blanched and presented on the table glistening like green jewels, just enough to fill a single memorable spoonful. This more than anything is the taste of spring arriving straight from the fields.
As a main course, Hagi shuns the use of wagyu beef that has been fattened on grain. Instead, he takes the meat from retired milk cows that have grazed throughout their lives on open grass and given birth multiple times. Seasoned with the aromatic wood smoke, his sirloin steaks offer the rich natural flavor of mature beef.
Awards and accolades
It has been a rollercoaster ride for Hagi, one that has recalibrated his entire approach to cooking, his role as a chef and his relationship with his community. He and his restaurant have become a brilliant illustration of Fukushima’s remarkable recovery and rebirth.
In October 2013, Hagi was invited to Paris to serve a Fukushima-based menu to France’s then president, Francois Hollande — the first Japanese chef ever to prepare a meal inside the kitchen of the Elysee Palace, the official residence of the French president. Later that month, he did the same for Grand Duke Albert of Monaco in his palace on the Mediterranean coast.
Hagi has also been recognized by the Japanese government, receiving both bronze and silver in the Cooking Masters awards for the nation’s outstanding chefs.
And in 2023, Hagi was picked as Restaurant of the Year from the 10 winners of The Japan Times’ annual Destination Restaurants award.
However, Hagi’s greatest accomplishment is perhaps simply to have flown the flag for the food producers of Fukushima. Their revival and rehabilitation mirrors that of the entire prefecture as it clambers back from catastrophe.
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