Kaiseki at Yoshida Sanso is an elegant feast for the senses

Our first Japanese destination, Osaka, celebrated street food, casual dining, and an all-out approach to profligate consumption called kuiadore (eat 'til you drop). Kyoto's food philosophy is at the opposite end of the spectrum. More than one thousand years as a sacred imperial capital elevated refinement, sophistication and nobility into the artistic world of kaiseki.

Kaiseki is a multi-course meal, with a procession of small dishes that each give fanatical attention to taste, presentation and tradition. The closest Western equivalent is a lavish, multi-course chef's menu at a Michelin-starred restaurant. But with kaiseki you're less likely to recognise what you're eating. Don't panic, none of it is too weird and most of it is tasty, though there was one bowl of what might have been fish intestines to which we both returned the lid rapidly. You'll be ploughing through with chopsticks, the array of ceramics on and in which things are served will dazzle you and ... if you're lucky ... you'll be served by ladies in ravishing kimonos.

There are a lot of places to have kaiseki in Kyoto, and a lot of travel writers offering lists of the best options. The most highly-rated ryokans tend to be celebrated for their kaiseki as well, however, so we thought we'd kill two Japanese birds with one stone. Thus we experienced two nights of dining like members of the imperial court at Yoshida Sanso. (For more about what it's like to stay here, read my last article.)

Kaiseki at Yoshida Sanso consists of nine courses: an appetiser selection of sashimi, cold salads and small bites; a soup course; a full sashimi course; four more savoury dishes that are mostly fish, though beef or a vegetarian course may turn up; the traditional kaiseki conclusion of miso soup, rice and pickles; and, as a concession to Westerners, a final dessert course. This last is probably just fruit, however. Extravagant sweets are not part of this tradition.

Apon arrival at Yoshida Sanso you'll be offered a choice between three levels of kaiseki. The regular (top photo) is £134, the gourmet (pictured below) £225 and a third level some astronomical price for a degree of epicurean excess that our kind hostess discouraged us from pursuing. (I suspect it's for profligate business dinners where people want to show off to the point of wastefulness.) We opted for the regular our first night and the upgrade on the second. While interesting to see and taste the different menus, if I had to do it again I would have stuck with the standard. There is no difference in the numbers of courses, the quality of their taste or the staggering effort put into presentation.

The additional £91 basically gets you more, and higher quality, animal protein. Back tuna in the sashimi course becomes the fattier belly cut (toro). A cooked fig with salmon milt upgrades to a delicate lobster tail in broth. The Japanese, unsurprisingly, don't make the mistake of overcooking lobster and turning it rubbery, as so many Western chefs do. Steamed sea bream becomes grilled beef. Perhaps most importantly, the mountain yam salad with crunchy pops of pomegranate seeds becomes buttered abalone. This mollusc is one of the most expensive seafoods in the world, with a texture between a scallop and squid and a taste that's gently salty and with a richness that's almost buttery. I'd never had it before, and it was delicious, though I think I still prefer the less exalted scallop.

Overall, kaiseki is a celebration of the bounties of the sea, presented both raw and cooked. Over two nights ... in addition to the fish already mentioned above ... we had Pacific saury, sea bream, squid, tachiuo (silver belt fish), Pike eel, red snapper, mackerel, shrimp, salmon and flounder. Japan in general would be tough for anyone who doesn't eat fish. Kaiseki would probably be impossible.

If the foundation of fine French food is its sauces, the same seems to be true of broths for kaiseki. And indeed, for Japanese cuisine overall. Nearly half of the courses were swimming, whether in a full-on soup or a small puddle, and therefore served in bowls. Naturally, this makes much of the food quite wet and pushes texture towards soft rather than crunchy. In retrospect, I find myself wondering if this is a natural consequence of a cuisine without knives and forks. Lacking the ability to cut anything yourself, it makes sense that everything is soft enough to be severed by teeth and that bowls can be picked up to slurp in all the bits and pieces of goodness your chopsticks leave behind. There is plenty of variety in the soups, with flavour originating from bean pastes, fish or vegetables, but they're all enormously subtle.

Overall, the kaiseki food is a lot like Japanese gardens: deceptively simple. There may only appear to be two or three things in your bowl, but each has been prepared with multiple, complicated steps and developed to the extremes of its natural flavour.

Alcohol isn't included in the price of your meal, but selected from a separate wine and spirits list. We went for the house's premium sake, prepared exclusively for them by a local maker. It was lovely stuff, served cold in small jugs that are roughly the same as a half-bottle of wine. The taste was crisp and a bit acidic to cut through all that fish, with a slightly harder, more alcoholic edge than your average white wine. Thus the wisdom of consumption from small cups. We spent about £35 each night on fairly liberal consumption.

People eat with their noses as much as their taste buds. Here, your eyes are also integral to the process. Every course comes out on different pottery. Some is elegant with sophisticated glazes and delicate painted patterns. Some rough and homespun. There are little boxes and lidded bowls to open up to reveal treasures inside. Shapes vary from simple circles and squares to dishes in the shape of leaves or sea shells. One particularly pleasing crescent resembled an overturned samurai helmet. There must be a large room in the house just for storing all the ceramics. Through 18 courses over two nights I never saw anything used twice.

That visual pleasure extends to both your surroundings and the ceremony with which you're served. The first night we were in a room overlooking the gardens, the second in perhaps the finest room in the house, with windows on three sides giving you a panorama of the hills as the sun faded and twinkling electric light took over. (Perhaps dining in this room is also part of the upgrade?)

It is an unprecedented luxury to get top-restaurant quality service when there are just two of you in the room, and this is probably the most luxurious element of the kaiseki experience. Our servers were different over the two nights, both in exquisite kimono and with a grace of movement that illustrates why Japanese ladies have become legendary for their elegance. The vegetable hotpot on our second night was more extraordinary for its segmented, three-tiered pot and the way our hostess unstacked it and poured broth from the top piece than it was for the taste. (Which was also very good.)

The food experience at Yoshida Sando extends to extraordinary breakfasts. On our first morning, the staff was horrified to realise that they'd misread our instructions and had prepared a Japanese rather than Western breakfast. While they could swap out the tea for coffee, the food itself takes too much preparation time for a last-minute change, so we experienced one full-on, gourmet Japanese breakfast in the panoramic dining room. Another profusion of plates and bowls (eight), different again from the night before, brought us grilled fish left to cool to room temperature, broth you were meant to enhance with tofu, seaweed and spring onions, pickles, rice and fruit. I'm a fan of sweet stuff at breakfast and like some differentiation between the first meal and the others of the day, so I wouldn't make a habit of this. But the variety was great fun and the English-language Japan Times waiting on the table for us a nice touch.

The second morning's Western breakfast proved that Yoshida Sanso's kitchen can handle foreign food as well as their native cuisine. Buttery scrambled eggs, sausage with crisp skins and soft interiors, meaty bacon, artfully cut fruit and a basket of still-warm pastries that could go head-to-head with anything in Paris or Copenhagen.

Eating at Yoshida Sanso was tremendous fun and satisfied our desire for fine dining while we were in Japan. While we loved the experience, we were content to go for much simpler meals for the rest of the trip, usually sushi or multi-element set menus that give you a small sense of the variety of kaiseki but are much humbler in scope, sophistication and price. I join the chorus of travel writers, however, in encouraging everyone to try kaiseki at least once if you're visiting Japan. And if you can afford to splurge on Yoshida Sanso, you'll be doing it at a level of quality fit for royalty.