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.

Eat Osaka's cooking school offers some basics for enjoyment in Japan and re-creation back home

With the steady rise of food tourism has come a boom in one-off cooking classes that complement your sightseeing agenda. A decade ago it was rare to find such things outside of a handful of culinary capitals or luxury hotels; now the challenge is wading through online reviews to figure out which of the copious options is best suited for the serious cook.

Fortunately, an in-depth feature story on Eat Osaka guided my choice. The founding team of a Scottish husband and Japanese wife suggested and adept ability to cross cultures and teach in English, while a partnership with Tower Knives testified to high quality. Our experience matched the laudatory write-up.

The class takes place in a small house in a tiny backstreet behind the showy facades of Shinsekai. Most of this kind of older urban housing has been swept away by tower blocks, so it was a treat to experience one. It seemed similar to the Victorian two-up, two-downs so typical in Britain’s industrial towns, before renovation and expansion turned their cramped spaces into our staple urban housing. We didn’t see upstairs, but down was a tiny space comprising two rooms and a galley kitchen. Later, in Tokyo, we'd see a model of almost the exact same floorplan in the Edo Museum's section on post-war housing.

We entered into the standard area to take off and leave shoes (perhaps five feet long and two wide)just inside a sliding door. Once you change into slippers you can step up to room level. We left all our things in the first room before stepping into the second, as it's almost entirely filled by a high table/cooking area that comfortably accommodates eight students. Comfortable when concentrating on the space in front of you, but don’t swing your arm too far back or you risk putting your hand through a sliding screen. And tall people must mind their heads between every room; a lesson anyone over 6 feet learns quickly in Japan.

Most of the cooking took place on plug-in grills or hobs brought out as needed, since the kitchen was too small for much more than hand washing and noodle boiling.

Our instructor, Yasuko, was a bundle of energy and kept us going through the preparation of three dishes despite the heat rising. (Cold beer helped, as well.) Osakans promote the casual, constantly-partying nature of their town, including a rich legacy of street food. That's what we were concentrating on. Takoyaki, crispy balls of octopus and dough, are the most famous local treats, but the rapid flipping required to turn a layer of batter into individual balls is far too advanced for a basic class. We started with simpler fare, though some skill was definitely still required.

Our menu: kitsune udon, chicken yakitori and chopstick okonomiyaki. The second was the easiest and most likely to make it into the home cooking rotation, the third the tastiest though most challenging. And it was the first that showed me I can still learn things about my husband.

Miso soup is as ubiquitous to Japanese cuisine as bread is to start European meals. This often gets dropped in the West; if you order sushi or tempura, you'll just get those things. But in Japan, a bowl or cup of miso seems to come out as a side to pretty much every order. Sometimes it's a work of art, studded with interesting ingredients and served in an extravagant lidded bowl. Sometimes it's as basic as a slurp of broth with a few tofu cubes and a piece of seaweed. It's consumed at all three meals, and 75% of Japanese people drink miso at least once a day. It's the basis for udon, ramen and all the other noodle dishes that form the backbone of simple, everyday Japanese food. And my husband ... who, before this trip was confident he loved Japanese food ... hates it. Turns out he dislikes clear broths of any sort. Something I never knew, but now explains why he's never interested in any of the chicken soups I make. He's fine with stock as a base ingredient to make something else, but as a finished dish he doesn't like soups unless they are creamy, either literally or in texture.

Thus the kitsune udon was our only shared noodle experience in three weeks in Japan. I went on to slurp other variations, but we never made it to any of the ubiquitous noodle bars that many tourists make a mainstay of their visit.

Kitsune means "fox", though there's none of that particular vermin in the soup. It may bear the name because of its colour, or it could be linked to the shinto fox-god of luck and business. Whatever the origin, it's a Japanese favourite differentiated by thick, flat noodles and a fried piece of tofu. The process for making udon, it turns out, is almost exactly the same as making Italian pici: make dough, roll dough, fold accordion-style, cut thin ribbons, toss in a bit of flour to prevent sticking. The Japanese method has two important differences. Once made and wrapped in a double layer of plastic, Yasuko had us knead our ball of dough by marching on it. Then we "developed" it by wearing the stomped disc of dough next to our skin for half an hour. On that hot, humid night, it must have been like putting dough in a steamer. Whether that's a gimmick or a critical step, the finished noodles were excellent.

Yasuko's secret on the yakitori was a generous glug of Japanese whisky. My big lesson: cook low and slow with complete attention. All the sugar in the marinade makes it very easy to burn your meat skewers once you start cooking.

Okonomiyake was the most intriguing of the dishes. It's a pancake, filled with anything you can imagine, then cooked, rolled and topped with kewpie mayonnaise and a special okonomiyake sauce that delivers an intense umami hit. (Happily, both sauces are available online in the UK.) We made the version beloved of street festivals. The pancake starts normally, poured in a circle on a flat grill. You put a large shiso leaf on the grill first, giving the finished pancake a bit of tang and a finished look. Rather than flipping it, however, you roll it around two chopsticks that become the stick for the sausage-shaped treat above. The flipping was a test of manual dexterity, but not impossible once you get the hang of it. Tellingly, each student cook did better than the one before, learning from earlier examples.

After cooking our three dishes, we discovered there were benches underneath the work surfaces that pulled out, turning our student kitchen into a dining room. Our fellow cooks were one Australian and three other English, all using the rugby as en excuse to explore Japan. Conversation and beer flowed, our food was delicious and we all enjoyed the company until we wrapped up at 9:30. That's early enough to take in the lights of Shinsekai, and to perhaps get another drink somewhere. But we called it a night. There were more adventures to come.

Mayfair's Umu celebrates perfection in every element

Obsession is a necessity for Michelin-starred chefs. Nobody survives in a gruelling industry that robs you of your social life, rises above fierce competition and delivers perfection night after night without a bit of mania over what they do. In my reading about Japanese culture in advance of our trip later this year, I've seen something similar. The gardeners who groom every leaf on a tree to a painterly perfection, the generations of swordsmiths who hand down and hone their skills to create the ideal samurai blade, the calligraphers who strive for years to get a character just right ... there's plenty of obsession on display.

I began to suspect that fine dining and Japanese food would be an eminently logical match. An evening at Mayfair's Umu validates that suspicion.

Head Chef Yoshinori Ishii does more than deliver exceptional food. He matches a range of pottery (some of which he's designed) and lacquerware to the food and its position in the parade of dishes to make a visual statement. His biography tells us he's also a keen calligrapher, so no surprise that one of the courses is served on top of a poem, written in bold calligraphy by Yoshinori, illustrated by his own drawings. If that sashimi tastes fresher than any you've ever tasted, thank his love of fishing in the traditional Japanese style. Not only has he found his own Cornish suppliers; he's taught them the art of ikejime ... dispatching a fish quickly with a needle into the nervous system, curtailing the fright and struggle that releases meat-toughening hormones and acids. When that fish comes to you as a hand roll, it's presented by a Yoshinori-designed wire arm, symbolically from his touch direct to yours.

Umu specialises in kaiseki, the highly-ritualised, multi-course gourmet tradition of Kyoto. The biggest splurge during our upcoming trip involves an exclusive ryokan (inn) in the hills above the ancient capital where our courses will be brought to our rush-matted, paper-screen-walled room by our kimono-clad hosts. Before diving in at the deep end in a language we don't understand, I thought it made sense to get familiar with kaiseki on home turf. It was also my husband's birthday; a two-Michelin-starred Japanese restaurant was suitably celebratory. (And the price of a full kaiseki meal definitely needs to be reserved for a special occasion.)

Our eight course (but nine dish; one course had two parts) celebration started with "mukozuke." From what my post-meal research tells me, this is the word for a small, intriguing snack served in or on an interesting piece of pottery, often with a rough but beautiful finish and some kind of artful deformity. Here, a battleship grey bowl with a slightly pitted surface and a slightly shiny glaze would have been a perfect circle had the potter not bent one side in, forming a shape like an apostrophe. It was a quirky and beautiful piece that demanded inspection before you ever paid attention to the food. Inside was a lovely melange of gently-cured sea trout, wafer thin slices of turnip, pickles and caviar. Two generous bites or four dainty ones, it was an elegant foreshadowing of all to come.

"Nimonowan" is a simmered dish or soup cup, here titled "Ocean Breeze" and served in an exquisite lacquer bowl with lid that you remove to create your own little tabletop drama. Inside, a layered disc of Cornish lobster, abalone and nori seaweed sat in a broth so clear it almost disappeared. Later, we both agreed that the menu probably had one course more than it really needed, and this is the dish my husband would cut. He's never been a fan of lobster and thought the example here was slightly overcooked and too chewy. (Which is what he almost always says about any lobster.) I suspect the chewiness was the abalone. Whatever the truth, it was still one of the most exquisite interpretations of soup I've ever had and very tasty.

The next course was the double dish. "Tsukuri" is the set up to executing a Judo throw. One assumes that implies a partnership with the course to come, or maybe the first plate set up the second, but nobody told us. My only real complaint with Umu was that the serving staff (entirely European, heavy on Italians) doesn't really give you much information on your food beyond the basics, even though they knew we were interested. Many Michelin-starred places will go into detail about their supply chain, the inspiration behind the dish or even how you're supposed to eat something. We could have used more of that in this delightful, but very alien, environment. It seems that's simply not their style.

Tsukuri started with slices of raw turbot. People often claim "you can read through it" when describing  how thinly they've sliced something. Yoshinori plays with that idea by serving the slices on top of a poem he's written about the joy of food. Unless you can actually read Japanese characters, you can't test the "read through" claim completely, but it's a fun touch. Delicious as the turbot was, the highlight here was my first taste of real wasabi. The stuff you get in almost all sushi restaurants is an industrially-produced approximation made from horseradish, mustard and food colouring. Real wasabi is a root, notoriously difficult to grow, that releases a piquant kick when grated that fades within minutes. Obviously, most restaurants don't want to dabble with an ingredient with no shelf life after preparation, even if it doesn't cost £22 for a thumb-sized piece. The taste of the real thing, grated into a paste by moving in a circle on a piece of shark skin, is a mind-blowing blend of sweet and hot.

The sauces and the wasabi stayed around for part two: sashimi. This is probably the ultimate expression of the idea that the best ingredients don't need much done to them. Five pieces of top quality fish, incredibly fresh, taken from the best part of the fillet. I've had a lot of great sushi in my life, but the only time I've come close to this freshness was when we tried slivers of the fish we'd just caught off Puerto Rico before we left the boat. When fish is this fresh, it's almost a crime to cook it. And every kind tasted significantly different from the other. (Something, let's face it, you don't really get at Itsu.) The most fascinating morsels here were the back and belly tuna, side by side. Belly is a rare delicacy, and I've had it before ... but never this rich or pungent. We're talking the foie gras of the piscine world here. Honestly, the flavour was too much for me; I could have happily substituted another bite of back, but am glad I tried it.

Next came my dish of the day. "Agemono" means deep fried food in Japanese, and I suspect we were into the comfort food section of the menu. The description was sweetcorn three ways. I am from a corn state. I have an annual moan about the poor quality of the corn in the UK while I indulge in memories of buying sacks full fresh ears from the fields down the road from my childhood home and eating them before they'd been off the stalks for four hours. As glorious as those Missouri memories are, they couldn't touch the expressions of that noble vegetable here. There was a kernel-stuffed spring roll, a quarter of a grilled cob and a croquette I can only describe as deep fried creamed corn. We may have been in a Japanese restaurant, but it's as if the chef had distilled the essence of the best of an American midwestern summer onto a plate. I almost wept with joy. And if that wasn't enough, you unrolled the husk to find a line of perfectly popped and seasoned corn. Four ways! And each perfect.

"Hiyashimono" followed: smoked and cured mackerel with somen noodles and Japanese ginger. I couldn't find a translation for this title, but this was my husband's favourite dish. I suspect he was experiencing a similar cross-cultural childhood flashback, given how essential mackerel is to Danish cuisine. It is, however, the dish I would cut. Not that I didn't like it: the mash-up of sashimi and cold noodle salad would be a huge hit with me for a summer lunch. But at this point I'd reached satisfaction point on the raw fish and didn't need more.

"Yakimono" means grilled or pan fried and brought us out of the ocean for the first and only land-based meat dish: lamb two ways, with accompanying sweetbreads. Regular readers will know I'm not keen on lamb or offal, though I'll soldier through anything on a chef's tasting menu. (Which is how I got familiar with sweetbreads in the Loire Valley.) A benefit of the Japanese love of bite-sized morsels is that anything's tolerable this small. In fact, the rump and fillet were both rare and delicately spiced, avoiding the lamb-y flavours I dislike. This bit of sweetbread was more solid, chewy and unadorned than the heavily sauced French version. Not bad, but still not anything I'd order for myself.

Kaiseki traditionally ends with a bit of white rice, which explains the seemingly odd appearance of sushi hand rolls as the final savoury dish. The menu delivers up two per person which is, frankly, more than even the biggest appetites need at this point. But the options are so tempting it was a relief not to have to choose just between the smoked eel and the tuna. This was the dish that came out held aloft by the wire hand, or "gohan".

While I love Japanese food, I remain sceptical about the cuisine's ability to deliver on the dessert front. Umu didn't change my mind. Their offerings were beautiful ... we actually had two since my husband's tomato allergy precluded the dish included in the kaiseki ... but a bit too experimental for satisfaction. Both had vegetal elements, which I always find difficult in dessert. As a work of art, however, "ajisai", or hydrangea, was a wonder. Tiny cubes of blue and pink jelly, coloured naturally by butterfly pea flower and pink amber tomato, covered a mound of sweet white bean puree. This looked remarkably like a hydrangea flower head, with a smooth, creamy and mildly floral taste. Unfortunately the shiso sorbet beside it didn't work for me. Even though shiso is related to mint, it was too much like having a salad on the plate with my pudding.

I thought my husband's dish was more successful: mango with a panna cotta-like cream and a caramel sauce. The experimental element here came with more wasabi, served as a whole root as a side with the grater. You were supposed to grate your own and add it to the sweet for a flavour contrast. It was a bit like putting pepper with strawberries and worked to an extent, but my husband found it tough to get the wasabi / mango balance right.

As usual with a blow-out tasting menu, we went with the matching wine flight. Except that at Umu, a sake flight is an option. That seemed too experimental for my husband, so he stuck with the grapes while I threw caution to the wind with fermented rice. I was the clear winner.

By course three it was obvious that sake in your bog standard Japanese is restaurant is to the good stuff what a wino's rotgut is to Burgundy or Bordeaux. Every glass was balanced and nuanced, with a range of subtle tastes. Most, in a blind tasting, could easily have passed for wine. And unlike my husband's selections, mine came with a fascinating array of cups, from rough pottery to cut glass to fine porcelain that looked like a sea urchin. I learned from our sommelier (who got more chatty once we determined that he was from a Sicilian village in the same mountain range where my grandfather was born) that though rice has some aspect of "terroir", variations in sake flavour have much more to do with yeasts, fermenting processes and production decisions. The variety was exceptional, from a bone-dry, almost mushroomy offering to a slightly effervescent lemon treat that was like limoncello re-invented for sophisticated grown ups.

Most two-starred restaurants tend to steer everyone to the tasting menu, and if they have a la carte it's often more expensive than the chef's choice. That's actually not the case at Umu. You could pop in here at short notice, grab a seat at the sushi bar and get a couple of dishes and a glass or two of sake for something that approximates the cost of an average meal elsewhere in Mayfair. Not cheap, but a lot less than the full blow out.

Winchester, Kyoto and Tolkien combine for the perfect date night

Your sense of distance changes depending on your surroundings.

Growing up in St. Louis, pretty much every activity (including school) was half an hour away by car. Life was much the same in Dallas. Weekends regularly included two- or three-hour drives to local points of interest, and we thought nothing of a 300-mile weekend road trip to Chicago.

When I first started working in England, I brought that attitude with me. My first assignment came with a company car and a credit card for unlimited fuel. I used it. More than 500 miles a weekend wasn't unusual as I worked through every significant stately home, charming village, ruined abbey and dramatic landscape in reach.

More than 20 years on, and living permanently in the UK for 15, I've embraced a more British attitude. Infrastructure and expense are two culprits. Going anywhere in this country usually means sitting in traffic that will make the journey twice as long as it should be. Once you get there, parking will be hard to find, perilous to fit your car into and ridiculously expensive, and fuel is pricey. None of which, however, should deter me from weekend jaunts to our county town of Winchester, just 23 miles away.

Every time I go, I think to myself that I should go more. After this weekend, I'm making more of an effort to move our occasional "movie date nights" there. Winchester's Everyman Cinema is a marvellously sophisticated way to consume a film, and Kyoto Kitchen has been reviewed as one of the best Japanese restaurants in the country.

Each of the 28 Everyman cinemas in the UK is different, because they like to give new purpose to historic old buildings, but I think the ethos across all of them is the same. Intimate and sophisticated, they're more like some mogul's private screening room than a modern cinema. The manager gives a personal welcome and introduction to each film. Premium seats are oversized armchairs and sofas, and the lobby is a cocktail bar. They even deliver freshly-made pizzas to the seats. Clearly, this appeals to a rather niche target market: the pre-film advertising was for Sipsmith Gin, Hermes scarves and Green and Black chocolate. The only drawback is availability. With just two screens (in Winchester) rotating an handful of films, plus theatrical, operatic and ballet live broadcasts, you need to work to their schedule and booking in advance is usually a requirement.

We were there for Tolkien, the new biopic looking at how the youth of the master of epic literature shaped his writing. The difference between the mainstream reviewers' reactions (lukewarm to aggressively negative) and ours (highly positive) shows why I pay little attention to professional critics. I am clearly not their target market. Most of them griped about the film lacking daring or innovation, or how it was too pedestrian in its pacing. I saw an old-fashioned (in the best possible way) tale of love and friendship, and of dreams overcoming adversity. Set ... aside from the expectedly grim WW1 bits ... in a particularly easy-on-the-eye bit of English history. If you're a fan of Downton Abbey, or that elegiac twilight of British Empire, this film is for you.

The lush Arts and Crafts interiors, in fact, were almost a character in their own right. As well as I know that stylistic movement, and the tales of Middle Earth, I had never put two and two together.  Tolkien spent his childhood surrounded by a cultural zeitgeist that celebrated myth, legend and fairy tale. Of course that influenced his writing. If you know anything about the professor's life, the other influences ... the horrors of industrial Birmingham after a childhood in the countryside, the majesty of Wagner, the nightmare and loss of WWI ... won't be a surprise. But it's great to see them put together into a story both sad and joyous and, ultimately, inspiring.

Afterwards, it was a short walk through Winchester's picturesque Georgian and Victorian streets (Tolkien would have approved) to the Kyoto Kitchen.

This small (no more than 40 covers) restaurant in the repurposed ground floor of an Edwardian house in a row just off the high street was considered one of the best Japanese restaurants in the country by the late, great critic A.A. Gill. (I often quibbled with his film reviews, but almost never with his much-missed food writing.) It's also been awarded a plate in the Michelin-guide, one step below the star system. Kyoto Kitchen has, therefore, been on our "must do" list for years but, embarrassingly, we never managed to make it there. Now that we have, I suspect we'll be back soon.

The menu features a broad range of sushi, sashimi and tempura, plus main courses like grilled black cod, duck breast with raspberry teriyaki sauce and lamb chops with white miso. Thus you can assemble your meal as you wish: feast on raw fish, graze on a succession of small plates or assemble a more traditional European three courses. Since it was our first visit, we left ourselves in the kitchen's hands and went for the chef's menu. This featured a procession of nine exquisite plates, all shared between us, for the astonishing price of £34.95 per person. Here's another reason to love Winchester. I haven't seen a tasting menu in a Michelin-noted restaurant inside the M25 for any less than £70 in years. But even outside of London, we'd have been likely to spend as much at the functional, food-court style sushi place in our local mall. Kyoto Kitchen is a remarkable bargain.

We liked every dish, but thought some were particularly stellar. Tori Kara Agè combine the moreishness and comfort of chicken nuggets with gourmet spicing and light-touch frying. This is why panko bread crumbs exist. Their tempura is excellent, though don't dawdle. Every second it cools is a step away from perfection. In a world where sushi and sashimi have become commonplace lunch take-aways, this was a reminder of the vast differences you can find in fish. Itsu's boxes are excellent, but Kyoto Kitchen's sashimi was noticeably different: more delicate, yet at the same time more packed with flavour. We were less keen on the ume-shiso roll, where we thought the sea bass was overwhelmed by the shiso leaf and plum dust, but we appreciated the gourmet twist. Mochi ... glutinous rice parcels filled with azuki bean paste ... were far better than their description and opened my eyes to the fact that desserts may be my greatest leap into the unknown when we explore Japan later this year.

The restaurant decor says Japanese with a sparse elegance: light wooden floors, black ebony-style chairs, white tablecloths graced with an exquisite variety of pottery and kimonos and obi (wide belts) hanging on the walls. More essential to the properly Japanese experience is the staff. I've written before of the odd-but-typical experience of dining in London where the staff doesn't match the cuisine. Polish waitresses serving up Scandinavian, Australians presenting gourmet French, etc. While I don't have any problem with this, it certainly adds to the authenticity when the people taking care of you come from the same place as the recipes. Especially when your lead waitress takes the time to give you sightseeing tips from her home town and teach you some new Japanese words. We have now, usefully, mastered "oishī" with a big smile. That means "tasty". I suspect I'll be using it a lot when we reach Japan, and predict a few more practice sessions at Kyoto Kitchen in the mean time.

It is, after all, only 25 minutes away. And now, having scouted out exactly how far Kyoto Kitchen is from the train station ... just one stop past our own ... we can make the next trip by public transport, freeing us up for the matching 5-cup sake menu for an additional £20. Yes, that's right. A Michelin "plate" chef's menu, five courses with matching alcohol flight for less than £55. Londoners, eat your hearts out. Winchester is where it's at.

In the land of sausage and dumplings, a German-Japanese chef puts Munich on a different culinary map

The words "German cuisine" and "gourmet" are not a natural fit.  Plenty of people head to Bavaria for the beer, but they rarely rave about the food.  Every beer garden and traditional tourist restaurant serves the same hearty fare, building from the twin pillars of carbohydrates and pork products.  A bowl of kaesespaetzle (the Alpine version of mac n' cheese) is as comforting as your mother's warm hug as she tucks you under a fluffy duvet, but it's hardly elegant.

But, as a Munchener friend pointed out to me, that's not the way the natives eat.  Like the famous British fry-up ... which foreign visitors assume the locals eat every morning because that's what they get in every B&B, but the natives may do at home once a month ... traditional German specialities are  just one slice of the food scene here.

Like Copenhagen before it, young chefs in Munich are mixing tradition up with innovative ideas and unexpected fusions.  Based on our experience in the talented hands of chef Tohru Nakamura, I wouldn't be surprised if Munich starts trending as the Danish capital did a few years ago, and his Michelin-starred Geisels Werneckhof starts getting mentioned regularly alongside Noma and the Fat Duck.  At each place, chefs have turned traditional cuisine on its head to give the world something completely new.  In Nakamura's case, it's the improbable-sounding Japanese-German fusion.

This was the best meal we've had all year.  It was the one activity that appeared on both of our lists of favourites from across the whole holiday.  We have nothing in London like it.  Quite simply:  If you're serious about your food, it is worth planning a weekend getaway in Munich just to eat here.  It's that good.

I've encountered a few places claiming Japanese fusion, but they've been car crash hybrids offering oddities like wagyu beef tartare or chicken cordon bleu sushi.  This is far more subtle.  In fact, if you sat down to eat without context, you'd only see high-end European food.  You'd know that something was different, but not be able to put your finger on it.  A lightness of touch, a clarity to the sauces, the crunch of vegetables and the hint of flavours you can't identify.  But you won't be flying blind, because Nakamura takes the time to visit each table at the start of your meal, explaining his concept and why things will taste a little different.  How, for example, he uses Japanese "dashi" for the base of his sauces, which tends to make things lighter, brighter and a bit sharper.  (And you don't even need to speak German or Japanese; he rolled out perfect English for us.)

We went for the chef's menu, which you can select in a nine, seven or five course version.  We chose the middle path, though the profusion of little extras amounted to three or four additional courses on their own.  Starting with five would more than suffice on a second visit, but I'm glad we opted for more to experience the range of Nakamura's innovation.  We also went for the matching flight of drinks, selected in the same spirit of innovative fusion by Gascon-born sommelier Gerard Desmousseaux.  After checking our tolerance for experimentation, he delivered a menu of seven beautiful glasses ... each with interesting commentary ... that used wine, sake and beer to reach that perfect match to the food.

After a spread of delicate, unusual and gorgeously presented amuse bouche (top photo), our first course delivered the combination of taste, surprise and presentation that would characterise the rest of the meal.  Locally sourced char had been mildly smoked in juniper branches, then combined with a creamy custard and served in a perfectly hollowed-out egg, with chervil root for a bit of crunch and meadowsweet for herbal back notes.  We'd barely gotten over our appreciation for the first fish course when a second followed:  langoustines two ways, served in a bit of tasty broth with kohlrabi that had been given time to go soft and soak up the flavours.  (The notes in the Riverford veg delivery box always explain away the kohlrabi with "it's very popular in Germany"; if I could make it taste like this, I'd be happier about receiving it!)  The subtle Japanese elements here were umeboshi ... a fruit ... and a herb called shiso.  And, no doubt, the precision plating with flowers that channeled the horticultural perfection of a ikebana flower arrangement.

The dish of the night, for me, came next.  Regular readers will know that I'm a sucker for foie gras and have eaten far more than my fair share.  But never combined with sweet chestnut and pistachio (another favourite of mine), beetroot and sour cherry.  The sommelier paired this with some rose sake, sweet but with a dry finish, that pushed the whole thing right over the edge into sheer perfection.  It's one of those stand-out dishes I will remember for a long time.

It was so good, it nearly overshadowed the local pork that came next.  But it didn't, because: I've never had pork "shabu shabu" before (thinly-sliced, cooked quickly in boiling water); the accompanying pork belly was incredibly succulent; and pork with eggplant (aubergine) is a revelation I need to repeat.

The cheese cart arrived to divide savoury from sweet.  A solid, traditional offering, this was the course I could most easily have lived without.  But then I would have missed the spot-on pairing of a creamy, Belgian dark ale with the cheese.  There's one to try at home.

The menu promised two sweets, first a lavender honey ice cream.  Curiously, it was the secondary element, fig and oxalis pistou (note another use of little-known herbs), that took pride of place.  It was essentially a tartare-style patty of diced fig meat with the ice cream on the side, and a real treat for anyone who loves that fruit.  The final course was a celebration of pumpkin, yuzu (an Asian citrus) and carrot.  I appreciated this course intellectually, as a testimony to how sweet vegetables can gender-bend to the dessert side of things.  As an American, pumpkin for pudding is no stretch for me.  And I loved the presentation, arranged on a striking pottery plinth somewhere between pillow and altar.  But as a dessert lover, I was a bit disappointed.  Where was the chocolate?

I needn't have worried.  Noting that it was both our wedding anniversary and my birthday, the team wheeled out a third dessert course to wrap things up.  I was already well past replete and heading for stuffed when confronted with five more little chocolate-based sweets, one a mousse revealed by lifting up a delightfully kitschy "lucky cat".  A great element of fun to wrap up a very serious gourmet experience.

Geisels Werneckhof is a tiny place, with just two rooms and a handful of tables seating up to 50.  That allows for plenty of personal attention under the firm front-of-house direction of Julia Pleintinger.  Everyone was aware of our special occasion and made a fuss over us.  Though this isn't at all a touristy place, everyone spoke to us in English.  And everyone ... most particularly chef and sommelier ... realised we were serious about our food and wine and took the time to chat and give us details about our experience.  This remarkable meal was a high point of the whole trip, and I suspect it will be quite a while before we find another culinary experience that surprises and delights in such equal measure.