Eating a Moment

We visit a Bay Area Japanese izakaya, owned and operated by chef and author of the new Rintaro cookbook Sylvan Mishima Brackett ’98.

When I walk into Rintaro, a Japanese izakaya in the Mission District of  San Francisco,  Sylvan Mishima Brackett ’98 is waffling over a word. He sits at one of the handmade wooden tables with his laptop, in a neat button-down with the sleeves rolled up, and asks me, “What’s a better term for ‘add-ons?’” When his team of cooks sits down to go over the menu with him for the night, he asks them too. Enhancements isn’t right. What about supplements? He decides it works after some deliberation. As I shadow him in the hours before dinner service, I come to realize this is how he operates as a chef: with extreme attention to detail. It shows in everything—the intricate design of the menu; the hand-picked fresh ingredients used in every meal; the precision with which he slices perfect squares of goma dofu or identical strips of udon.

The restaurant space itself is a testament to his meticulousness. Nearly everything, not only the food you eat, but the table you eat it on, is handmade with care. Sylvan’s father, Leonard Brackett ’70, who trained as a temple carpenter in Kyoto, crafted the space himself, using redwood from old wine tanks and cedar he found on the Oregon coast. From the beams that line the narrow space’s ceiling to the bar slab, booths, and tables, Len’s elite handiwork is everywhere, a companion to Sylvan’s cooking artistry. Sylvan’s new cookbook, Rintaro, is dedicated to him and his memory.

Rintaro opened in 2014 and has been Michelin recommended since 2016. Given the restaurant’s quick success, Sylvan hadn’t found the time to release a cookbook until the fall of 2023. His wife, Jenny Wapner ’99, whom he first met outside the student union at Reed, edited and published the book. Rintaro promises to translate “the experience of a Tokyo izakaya to the home kitchen,” with recipes for sashimi, tofu, udon, and more. The idea is to make replicating the dishes of Rintaro possible at home, after a decade of carefully cultivating the space, the experience, and of course, the food.

The intense focus on the food began before Sylvan even found the restaurant space in the Mission. Prior to opening Rintaro, he diligently hunted for the best local ingredients—authentic wasabi from Half Moon Bay, bamboo shoots from Livermore, fresh herring from Monterey. Sylvan says finding those local, fresh ingredients, ones with “life and vitality” in them, as he puts it, has been key. Almost all of the ingredients in the dishes at Rintaro come from somewhere along the West Coast—not including the shipment of fish that comes in from a Tokyo fish market every Friday. Sylvan thinks of fish from Japan like truffles from France or caviar from the Caspian Sea. It’s “more interesting to taste the place” it really comes from, he says.

Part of Sylvan’s dedication to local ingredients is the sustainability aspect, but the other driving factor, he says, is that it just tastes better. And his philosophy on local ingredients extends to the entire Rintaro experience. “You’re tasting a specific time in a specific place. You couldn’t have that same meal somewhere else in a different time of year,” he explains. “You’re eating a moment.”

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“Sylvan” and the Japanese version of the name, Rintaro, mean “boy of the woods,” and growing up, Sylvan fulfilled that destiny. He was born in Kyoto—where his mother, Toshiko Mishima, is from—but was raised in the rural Sierras of Northern California, the kind of place, he says, with “outhouses and kerosene lamps,” in a Japanese-style house his father built.

Though Sylvan writes in the cookbook that he never expected to become a chef while he was growing up, much of his childhood centered around food. Dinner was always important to his family, and looking back, he is amazed at how much work his mother put into cooking them incredible meals each night, his favorite being her gyoza. Every few summers, he would return to Kyoto with his mother and his sister, Aya, where he fondly remembers slurping miso soup for breakfast and eating futomaki—thick sushi with simmered vegetables, egg, and shiitake—on special occasions.

Even sitting with his father in his woodshop informed Sylvan’s future as a chef. He says he sees lots of similarities between how his father approached carpentry and how he now approaches cooking. Len was obsessed with curating relationships with millers and loggers for his lumber to ensure he got first pick on the best wood. Sylvan is equally obsessed with business bonds—apart from his wife, he says he spends the most time on the phone with his fish supplier.

In a 2018 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle about the woodworking of Rintaro, Len said that he suspected Sylvan's growing up in the woodshop contributed to his craftsman-like cooking style. “If you look at Rintaro, the dishes are beautiful and the chopsticks are beautiful,” he said. “It’s how he does everything.”

Sylvan’s passion for food continued as he grew. In high school, he opened his first business—a pop-up restaurant for his senior project, where he served dishes like Japanese curry and pizza.

When he began looking at colleges, Sylvan didn’t initially want to go to Reed like his father had. But he fell in love with the intensity of the students, the way professors took those students seriously, and the strong personality of the campus. At Reed, Sylvan was able to further explore and improve his cooking skills. He made scones for the Paradox and threw themed dinner parties: a Moroccan-focused spread, tamale night, and once, after he’d dreamt about it, an entire meal made from apples. “It was actually really terrible,” Sylvan recalls of that particular party. “It was a total failure.”

He studied history, and even that discipline allowed him to focus on his love of food. His thesis, completed under Prof. Raymond Kierstead [history 1978–2000], focused on the development of taste as a cultural asset.

In the summers, Sylvan took kitchen jobs in Portland and San Francisco, and, one time, in France. He bought a motorcycle and shipped it across the world to ride around the French Riviera, but he spent much of the time “getting beat up,” as he puts it, working 14-hour days in a chaotic restaurant with only a half day off every week. Working long hours is something else Sylvan says he learned from his dad, who worked 70-80-hour weeks during his temple carpentry training.

After graduating, Sylvan moved with Jenny to the Bay Area and lived in a studio, working temp jobs to get by. Eventually, he got connected with the famed Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley—they needed someone good with computers to digitize Alice Waters’s treasured address book, where the personal information of writers, musicians, actors, and royalty lived. That task would turn into assisting Alice for six years. During that time, no one at Chez Panisse knew Sylvan cooked. The most food preparation he did during that time was making Alice sandwiches. But for special events, he would type up the menu, with her directing him from her handwritten notes—an experience he now considers integral to his skills as a chef and restaurant owner.

After those six years, he decided to travel to Japan and learn technical skills in cooking. He spent six months working long hours at two restaurants, a high-end kaiseki restaurant in a tiny neighborhood of Tokyo, and Soba Ro, a restaurant in Saitama, where he learned everything from how to roll udon and make kaeshi—a seasoning base for soba broth—to how to care for guests and “cook with heart.”

When he returned to the States, Sylvan felt alive and inspired with ideas. He opened a catering company, Peko Peko, out of his garage in Oakland, popular for its artful bento boxes. But Peko Peko was only the beginning. He began to conceive the idea for Rintaro, a Japanese izakaya, traditionally a small bar with quick bites, and a type of establishment not yet present even in the Bay Area’s diverse food scene.

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When Rintaro opened, it was met with acclaim—Bon Appétit named it one of its top 10 new restaurants six months after opening. Like the restaurant, the cookbook too has been quickly revered, appearing on the New York Times list for the best cookbooks of 2023. “Chef-driven cookbooks can often miss the mark of translating restaurant dishes for the home cook. Not here,” journalist Eleanore Park wrote.

As I watched Sylvan roll out udon dough and cut it by hand the old-fashioned way, I thought he did make it look easy. But the process takes a practiced hand. Despite having a staff of 45, Sylvan almost always hand rolls and cuts the udon noodles on his own. “It’s work that you can incrementally get better at for a very, very long time—it’s not like you figure out how to do it and you’re done,” he says. “It can always get better.” Earlier that morning, a cook had prepared the dough by kneading it underfoot, and in the afternoon, it had been kneaded again. In the low-lit back room a couple of hours before service, Sylvan lays out one of the off-white circles of dough on a monstrous cutting board to complete the process.

As he prepares his station, Sylvan explains that he tried every flour he could find in California for his udon before finding the right one across the ocean, in Kagawa Prefecture, Japan, a city sometimes referred to as "Udon Prefecture." Kagawa flour is ground super fine, which helps to make the noodles the right texture—silky on the outside and chewy on the inside, or, in Japanese, tsuru tsuru, koshi ga aru. Taking a wooden dowel from its place on the wall, Sylvan begins rolling out the circle of dough, flattening it into a rectangular shape with rounded edges. He folds it into thirds and lays it on another narrower cutting board before taking an udon knife and cutting the folded shape into small strips. His hand is precise; the noodles look identical as he gently bunches them together, shakes the excess starch off, and folds them into a clear plastic bin. He quickly moves onto the next circle of dough, transforming it into more noodles without missing a beat.

As dinner time approaches, Sylvan runs around the restaurant, preparing a new dish in the kitchen and meeting with the servers to go over the reservations for the evening. The space is loud with the sound of crinkling foil and whirring fans, clanking plates and chopping knives. It smells like vinegar and heat. In the back room, a sous chef grinds down smoked fish with an old-school teal-colored machine, shaving katsuobushi: fragrant fish flakes with an intense umami taste. Sylvan calls it Rintaro’s “secret ingredient.” The flakes that fall into the bin look a lot like wood shavings, and I wonder if the homage to Len and his work is purposeful or accidental.

Patrons start arriving for reservations a few minutes before five, lining up outside the wooden Rintaro gate where a big red lantern sways in the San Francisco breeze. The host leads them in, calling “Irasshaimase!” to the rest of the staff, who call it back in greeting. In simple terms, it means “welcome” in Japanese, but Sylvan explains its subtext translates to “I see you, and I will take care of you.”

The restaurant is quickly packed, first-timers and seasoned customers at tables, booths, and the bar. It’s hard to say which offers the best experience—the outside tables allow for a view of the plant-filled patio; the beautifully constructed booths offer privacy; but the bar lets you look in on the kitchen, where you can watch as the cooks grind fresh wasabi, precisely slice raw fish, and assemble colorful plates with expert hands.

That’s where I sat while I ate a variety of dishes from the à la carte menu. I’ve never been to Japan, but the way Sylvan describes Rintaro—not fusion, but as if the Bay Area were a region of Japan—seemed to ring true. Eating fresh yellowtail with authentic wasabi; steamed, fluffy fish cake in sweet, warm broth; juicy chicken yakitori; a carbonara-inspired udon (tsuru tsuru, koshi ga aru, just as Sylvan said it should be) with that flavorful katsuobushi; cheese katsu fried to perfection; and a soft mochi-covered strawberry to finish it off felt like taking a tour of traditional Japanese cuisine with fresh, local Bay Area ingredients.

The process of creating a whole experience for patrons is satisfying to Sylvan, and he puts thought into every piece of it—from the more significant elements like the handmade decor and the expertly crafted food to the finer details like the music that sounds through the speakers and the verbiage of the menu. When you eat there, it’s about the experience just as much as it’s about the food. As Sylvan says, “I like the element of throwing a party basically every night.”

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It’s one thing to eat at a restaurant, and another to try and emulate the experience at home, which is the entire goal of the Rintaro cookbook. Inspired by the time I spent with Sylvan, I tried my hand at a few of the book’s recipes. To preface, I’m not a cook. By that, I mean I haven’t even cooked enough to earn the title of “bad cook,” let alone a “good” one. But I took to my kitchen and spent an afternoon cooking a few of the dishes in the book, in an effort to re-create at least some of my Rintaro experience with a green bean and fruit shira-ae (tofu and sesame sauce); tonkatsu (pork loin katsu) with snowy cabbage and rice; and a grapefruit zeri (kanten jelly) for dessert.

Even for a true amateur like me, it went much more smoothly than I anticipated. I learned a lot along the way—how to toast sesame seeds without burning them (a delicate process); how to cut pork loin into even cutlets and fry them to golden-brown deliciousness; how to snow cabbage into thin strips; how to cook rice so it’s not al dente or mushy (another delicate process); and how to carefully pour and set grapefruit jelly into delicate rinds. As a typically impatient person, I learned how to take it slowly and mimic Sylvan’s attention to detail, remembering something he said about getting into a “flow state” while he worked.

When I asked Sylvan what he thought made Rintaro special, he pointed to two things: “I think the fact that we take the ingredients so seriously. And that when we do things we make almost everything by hand.”

The cookbook acts as an extension of those touchstones. I wasn’t sitting at a handmade bar and listening to the sounds of experienced cooks plating my food when I ate my home-cooked meal, but I had the satisfaction of eating something I had created, made delicious by the local land. My presentation left something to be desired—I was in the process of unpacking when I cooked, so the food was served on paper plates—but it all tasted good, and that’s what mattered most to me. The spread included fresh fruit and vegetables grown on the West Coast and local meat raised fewer than 50 miles from Portland. In another time of year, in a different place, the dishes would have looked and tasted entirely different. Like Sylvan ensured at the restaurant, I wasn’t just enjoying a meal—I was eating a moment.

Cara Nixon is a writer for Reed Magazine.

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