Paris and Tokyo are geographically 9715 kilometers apart and culinary light years apart. The only thing they have in common is that they are the epicenters of the two best cuisines in the world. Everything else is alien to each other, tempura, sashimi, kabayaki for some, sauce riche, foie gras, boeuf bourguignon for others. Therefore, a chef who calls his grand tasting menu “Paris Tokyo” is either a lunatic or a genius. Christian Bau is probably both, although the share of genius is likely to be significantly higher than that of madness. Otherwise, he couldn’t serve us a West-Eastern marvel in which he unhesitatingly whipped up a tartelette with char caviar, salmon belly, mousse of tuna and marigolds, or a Japanese waffle in the shape of the rosette of a Gothic cathedral with saba mackerel, jasmine blossoms and a cream of Yuzu and the mountain pepper koshu are combined to create sensational plates where Paris and Tokyo are only millimeters apart.
Something incredibly unique
It is no exaggeration to say that German gourmets owe as much to Christian Bau to hardly any other top chef in recent history. Because he was the pioneer who, before anyone else, dared to bridge the gap between European and Japanese high cuisine and thus inspired hundreds of his colleagues. Without him, we would not come across dashi, ponzu, yuzu and miso as a matter of course, neither in ambitious restaurants nor in simple country inns. Without him, the cuisine of Japan would be a closed book for many of us. And Bau masterfully shows that the original still beats every copy with his tuna, to which he adds grated goose liver, edamame, avocado and a broth of elderflower full of pieces of summer truffle so lightly, as if all these ingredients had always been meant for each other; or with his Kampachi, the amberjack, which he arranges with caviar, sea urchin ice cream and nitrogen pearls from oyster water as artistically as a calligraphy – without making himself suspicious of culinary cultural appropriation. Because these creations are not fusions, not assemblages from the pillar saints of Japanese and European haute cuisine, but something incredibly independent, a new element in the periodic table of taste, created from the fusion of what only appears to be opposites.