Volume 04, Number 08
Dining
The White Fox
by Robert Forrest
Straight up the Namboku line and behind the Oji JR station is The White Fox, a small bar-cum-restaurant run by Brit Trevor Blythe, who has printed twenty years of experience on to two clean pages of tapas and otsumami. Starting innocently enough, our first plates were chorizo then smoked duck with capers that promptly arrived while the tuna and pork were prepared. Duck for me is my default choice if on a menu, but smoked with capers makes it more special, the chorizo is excellent too.
But it is when the tuna arrives that you begin to see what Trevor is capable of. Here was a neat turret of plump sashimi assembled like Jenga with splinters of green apple and sensational umeboshi dressing. I’m not particularly keen on this plum usually, but here Trevor mixes it with soy sauce and olive oil that is at once buttery and refreshing as it cloaks the fish from the burst of apple. It is delicious.
Most of the dishes are under Y1,000 and typically cooked to order while his wife Hiromi runs front-of-house, and we were chatting to her when the pork arrived: four perfect pyres of vivid green nanohana topped with Okinawa pork and tiny circles of onion. The flower of nanohana is typically found in oils, but Trevor buys it before it blooms, turning it into a broccoli-like puree that holds onto its wonderful colour—anything else would just grey. It rams a glob of vegetables towards your uvula as the sakura salt gently grazes the palette, its intensity of flavour a fitting metaphor for the compression of Trevor’s experience—something brought into focus last year when he won ‘Best Original Sushi’ from www.eat-japan.com for his mahi-mahi tataki.
As Trevor uses only seasonal food, he currently prepares duck for this dish in place of the fish. It sits on a tablet of rice speared with garlic, ginger, almonds and butter beneath a heap of kumquat and tapénade. At first the rice seems dry before it somersaults in your mouth, swamped by its damp headdress while you apprecaiate the bird. It is an extraordinary collision of tastes and textures that urge you to close your eyes to better see. And it is this and our concluding dark chocolate delight that summarises the confidence and experience Trevor has. Who else would use garlic and almonds to make chocolate taste more chocolatey?
If the location of The White Fox seems odd and the décor mundane, rest assured that Japan has in its hands the buds of a phenomenon.
Trevor Blythe, Head Chef/Patron The White Fox
So what makes Trevor’s food so special? To find out, Weekender spoke with him inbetween mouthfuls. First thing to know is that he has worked at four three-Michelin-star restaurants: two in England and two in France. Early in his career he worked in Britain’s oldest established restaurant, Rules in Covent Garden, and Waldos where he was part of the team that earned its first Michelin star before winning (another mouthful) the Academie Culinaire de Grande-Britannia Annual Awards of Excellence.
Tracking Trevor’s career through the nineties, he swayed between esteemed restaurants in Britain and France collecting more awards on the way. It was when the decade closed however that he accepted an invitation to come to Japan to open the Barakura English Garden in Nagoya. It was a fitting stepping-stone from his European background, and one that rolled into a book and TV programme on Japanese channel NHK two years later.
I’ve been holding off for a while to use the word ‘fusion’ to describe his food, as so often you need the ‘con’ prefix. Trevor avoids this though due to his considerable time in both Europe and Japan; he perfectly understands how flavours fit irrespective of location. It is this open-mindedness that led to the opening of The White Fox in late 2006, which has become a stage for him to express his culinary confidence—making it all the more surprising when you see such a modest venue.
Today he now rises at 9 to review the menu, preparing both lunch and dinner as deliveries arrive, before making frequent trips to Tsukiji to survey the latest piscine trend His wife Harumi looks after the customers and the drinks—she previously supplied them to restaurants when they met. In his small kitchen Trevor is aided by the able Harue Yagi, herself a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu. The success of his fusion is shown by the customers, Trevor quipping that; “when you see the Japanese drinking wine and Westerners nihon-shu you know that it’s working.” Indeed Trevor makes the effort to write the menu and his website in both Japanese and English—something particularly useful when one is so often confounded by kanji calligraphy on bottles in bars.
Clearly The White Fox has potential to expand once its style is established, something that seems a quiet possibility given how many of his dishes could be magnified into a single main course. For now, however, Trevor has given Tokyo a tasting menu for even greater things to come.
For more information on chef Trevor Blythe and The White Fox, see www.thewhitefox.jp/index.html or call the restaurant on 03-6903-6696.