Ten years ago, Ai Hosokawa moved her life from Tokyo to Kumamoto.
And her cooking seems to have become even more refined.
Kumamoto's rich nature, fresh ingredients, local cuisine, traditions, and the many people I met here...
All of these things evolve within her in the form of cooking.
The four people who are the inspiration for Ai Hosokawa's current cooking will create a new form and connect with each other here at Premium Salon.

Written by Ai Hosokawa

Since living in Kumamoto, I have started to pay more attention to the ingredients in my cooking.
When I was in Tokyo, for example, if it was a tomato, I would just keep thinking about how to cook it today. Whether I'm riding a bicycle or swimming in the pool, my mind is occupied by tomatoes, and my main concern is how to make them taste better and appeal to more people who eat them. It was a thing.

But now it's different. When I see a delicious-looking tomato at the market, I put it in a basket and take it home without thinking.
Then, as soon as I got home, I opened the bag and placed the tomatoes in an olive wood pot on the kitchen table.
I don't often cook right away.
As time passed, it became a part of the kitchen landscape, and before I knew it, it had ripened to a bright red color. becomes.
Grab a tomato. Smell. Touch it to see how elastic it is.
Then, an image of a dish finally appears in my head.
Still, I won't stop observing. Confronting the material earnestly. That's the way I cook now.

Kumamoto vegetables are delicious.
After continuing to travel around Japan and around the world, I think again.
So, I no longer dare to think about how to make it more delicious.
If anything, it's more important to be careful so that you don't spoil something that is delicious even if you don't do anything about it.

The taste that is created in this way has a sense of transparency and presence.
This won't happen with weak vegetables, but if they are delicious as they are, it would be nice to help them enhance their deliciousness. The most important thing for me is to cook in a way that doesn't feel like there's any obvious interference from the creator.

Similarly, Kaoruko Watanabe's sweets have no artificiality. That's why I love her sweets so much.
It looks like a single dignified tea flower, and although it has been carefully handled by humans, it has a natural elegance, as if it was born from the natural world.
The taste of mugwort mochi in spring makes us aware of the budding of young mugwort leaves, and in the case of summer mandarin orange jelly in early summer, it reminds us of the sweet and sour orange fruits that grow thick between the green leaves.

The same goes for Takeshi Sakamura's flowers.
There is a tea room called Koshoken in Tatsuta Nature Park behind our house.
He arranges flowers there every month and invites guests. Flowers that I found on a walk in the forest, a large branch of a decaying plum tree in my garden, even vines that were entwined with other plants by the roadside, all the flowers that could have been arranged in his hands. The branches also look like they are in nature.
However, if you look closely, you will see that there is something delicate and precious that only he can achieve.

Kumamoto's vegetables, fruits, grass, flowers, and trees inspire us every day.
Surrounded by mountains and the sea, the area experiences harsh summer heat and winter cold, and the things that are born and raised within this environment have a fleeting sense of ``life.'' For people who make a living from cooking, confectionery, and flowers, there are probably not many places that are so blessed.

In spring, we planted many flowers and trees in the garden again.
I wonder if the day will come when my daughter, who is still young, will be able to create something uniquely her own while feeling the breeze of the four seasons in the trees that have grown together.
While secretly waiting for that day, I want to live with cooking.

→Next time is Kaoruko Watanabe (patissier).

(Titles omitted)