One night, on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, I ordered a bowl of ramen and watched the cook serve a paste alongside the noodle soup that I’d never seen before. It was yuzu kosho. It only has three ingredients: salt, hot pepper, and yuzu, the Japanese citrus, but it’s fascinating. It has spice, fragrance, aroma—everything. There are two types: red, made from ripe yuzu and red chiles, and green, from unripe fruit with green chiles. I use the sharper green version to cut through rich meats, and the milder red in seafood dishes, like these grilled scallops.

Pairing note: Earthy Sumiyoshi Tokubetsu Junmai sake from Japan’s Yamagata prefecture stands up to yuzu kosho’s spice.

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A marinade of red miso, ginger, and garlic gives these steaks a crisp, flavorful crust and a juicy interior. Serve them with chef and cookbook author Tadashi Ono’s Grilled Tomatoes with Soy Sauce and Yuzu Kosho.

Adapted from “The Japanese Grill” by Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat. Copyright © 2011. Available from Ten Speed Press.

Featured in “The Japanese Grill.”

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Ripe tomatoes develop umami-rich flavor when grilled with a garlic, soy sauce, and yuzu kosho marinade. This recipe calls for red yuzu kosho, which is made from the Japanese citrus yuzu, red chiles, and salt—just a spoonful adds subtle heat and bright fragrance to the marinade. Mitsuba, a Japanese relative of parsley, lends a mild cilantro-like freshness. Serve this simple summer side dish alongside a juicy steak, such as chef and cookbook author Tadashi Ono’s Grilled Porterhouse with Garlic and Miso.

Adapted from “The Japanese Grill” by Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat. Copyright © 2011. Available from Ten Speed Press.

Featured in “The Japanese Grill.”

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One of my favorite places to eat in Tokyo doesn’t serve what most people would recognize as Japanese food. At Yoshikami, a little restaurant in the old Asakusa neighborhood, the menu features beef croquettes; ebi gratin, essentially macaroni and cheese with shrimp; and “Napolitan,” spaghetti sautéed with ketchup, bell pepper, and mushrooms. These dishes belong to a category of Japanese cooking called yoshoku—adaptations of European and American foods that trace their origins to the late 19th century, after Japan opened itself to the West—and for me, they represent the ultimate comfort food. When I was little, I’d accompany my dad to Yoshikami for dinner. To an impressionable eight-year-old, this was dinner and a show. White-toqued chefs worked behind a dining counter, tall flames shooting up around the skillets as they cooked. I would order the hamburg, a fried patty of ground beef and panko that was served not on a bun with a side of fries like its American antecedent, but with white rice and steamed carrots. My dad, meanwhile, would tuck into a Western-style slab of sirloin steak. We went a couple of times a year; it felt like a very special treat. I recently returned to Yoshikami for the first time in nearly 30 years. The restaurant was just as I remembered it, with its checked tablecloths and bustling chefs behind the counter. They were still using those same old recipes—the menu hadn’t changed a bit. I ordered a hamburg, and then I remembered my dad, thought what the heck, and ordered a steak too.

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Cooking over an open fire was central to traditional Japanese life until the 19th century; most households prepared their meals on the irori, a square-shaped open fireplace sunk into the ground. You still find houses with traditional hearths in the countryside, but in big cities like Tokyo, where I grew up, people don’t really grill at home anymore. Most houses don’t have the outdoor space for cooking, either, so grilling is left to professionals at yakitori restaurants, which specialize in grilled, skewered foods.

When I was a kid, there was a yakitori joint three blocks from my home, and whenever I passed by with my parents, I would see the smoke coming from the restaurant and smell the most tantalizing aromas. Then I’d be seized with the desire to go in—and I could usually convince my parents to do so.

Inside, there was always such a variety of food on the grill: all kinds of skewers threaded with things like chicken hearts, shiitake mushrooms, slivers of pork, and fish, all bite-sized and infused with the flavors of soy sauce, miso, sake, and char. I could easily eat a dozen skewers in one sitting. I could never get enough. The food made such an impression that as an adult, the first job I sought out as a chef was at a restaurant with a yakitori grill.

Working that station was a lot harder than it looked. It was hot—like standing in front of a furnace for five hours at a time. The grill was gas-fired, and the fumes made me drowsy. Even so, it was my favorite place in the restaurant.

At first I made a lot of mistakes. It seemed like I was always burning things or undercooking them. But I soon learned to keep a close eye on the skewers, and to move ingredients around on the grill so that they cooked by a combination of direct grilling (right over the flames, where the heat was most intense) and indirect (off to the side, where ambient heat cooked them more slowly). By the time I left that job, I really knew how to grill.

As much as I loved this style of cooking, it wasn’t until I moved to the United States that I had the chance to do it outside of a restaurant. Decades ago, when I’d just arrived in America from Japan, a group of friends invited me to join them for a barbecue at a park in Los Angeles. It was fascinating. We played ball! We drank beer! We took turns cooking hot dogs and hamburgers! I loved the fun of it, the casual talk, how friendly it all was. I have been a devotee of backyard grilling ever since.

I now live in Mamaroneck, New York, where we have a nice big yard and a classic Weber grill, and in the summer, I barbecue with family and friends every weekend. Over the years I’ve merged the lessons I learned from yakitori cooking with the way I like to cook in America. To start and finish the meal, I might do up some classic yakitori dishes like beef negimaki (scallions wrapped in thinly sliced beef) and grilled rice balls called yaki onigiri, which brown and crisp over the coals. For the main event, rather than the skewers of thinly sliced morsels traditional to yakitori grilling, I favor big American-style cuts—pork chops, porterhouse steaks—which I grill alongside ripe beefsteak tomatoes split down the middle.

But when I cook them, I do as yakitori cooks do. I grill with Japanese binchotan charcoal, which burns hot and clean, and I brush on Japanese marinades laced with soy sauce, miso, sansho pepper (a tingly cousin of Sichuan pepper), or yuzu kosho—a paste made from chiles and fragrant citrus fruit—while the food cooks. That way, the marinade is grilled with the meat, caramelizing and lacquering it beautifully. The wonderful aroma it creates takes me back to Tokyo every time.

Recipes

Grilled Porterhouse Steaks with Garlic and Miso

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Grilled Tomatoes with Soy Sauce and Yuzu Kosho

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One night 20 years ago, on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, I ordered a bowl of ramen and watched the cook serve a paste alongside the noodle soup that I’d never seen before. It was yuzu kosho. It only has three ingredients: salt, hot pepper, and yuzu, the Japanese citrus, but it’s fascinating. It has spice, fragrance, aroma—everything. There are two types: red, made from ripe yuzu and red chiles, and green, from unripe fruit with green chiles. I use the sharper green version to cut through rich meats, and the milder red in seafood dishes, like grilled scallops (right). —Tadashi Ono, Matsuri, New York City

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