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.

Luxurious Yoshida Sanso lets you live like a Japanese aristocrat

Experts agree that you must spend at least one night at a Ryokan, or traditional Japanese inn, to consider your Japanese trip a complete experience. But how to choose one? Ryokans run the gamut from urban hideaways to country retreats, high-end elegance to homey simplicity, focused on locals or looking to global tourism.

I had narrowed my hunt to two categories: either an inn built around hot springs, or onsen, in the mountains between Kansai and Tokyo, or a foodie experience in an historic home in Kyoto's suburbs. Kyoto won. This was primarily because, as much as I love grand views and long soaks in hot water, I didn't want to spend much of two whole days in transit to get two and from the experience. So my choice came down to a triple enticement of gourmet food, historical ties and an establishment obviously used to catering to Westerners.

Two nights at Yoshida Sanso cost about the same as the seven preceding ones spend in Ibis Styles hotels. And that was before we tucked into the Michelin-quality (and priced) meals and premium sake. It was the indulgence of an already indulgent trip. Was it worth it? I give a satisfied but slightly qualified yes. Others might be a bit less enthusiastic. The difference is my love of architecture and decorative detail.

The house is an exquisite example of a kind of Japanese architecture of the 1930s that merged a revival of traditional styles with Art Deco's love of clean lines and thoughtful decorative elements. It was built for a young imperial prince, who had recently become brother-in-law to his distant cousin the Emperor Hirohito, to be his residence while attending Kyoto university. It's said to be one of the few domestic, non-royal spaces where you can see the Imperial chrysanthemum crest used in the decor. As royal residences go, it's tiny; about the size of a modern, five-bedroom, suburban "executive home". But there, the similarities stop. The quality of the craftsmanship is extraordinary.

Count Higashi-Fushimi was passionate about traditional Japanese craftsmanship and wanted to show off the best of its contemporary practitioners here. (He went on to become a professor at Kyoto University and then a Buddhist monk.) There isn't a metal nail in the whole house, rather the whole thing is wood, carefully jointed together. Most of the walls are sliding screens and the windows sliding panes. We learned that these do rattle quite a bit in a stiff breeze. A sacrifice made for authenticity. One benefit, however, is that the place is pretty much earthquake-proof, since all of those organic pieces simply rock, sway, swell and shrink naturally into each other.

The precision carpentry is enhanced by beautiful metal work, from the incised chrysanthemum crests on the sunken, round handles in the sliding doors to striking light fixtures to simple but elegant hinges. There's a subtle but distinctive love of geometric pattern throughout: the rectangles of the sliding paper screens, the lines of reed partitions, the interlocking "L" shapes of the balustrades, the overlapping weave of the tatami mats. The house embodies the idea of wabi-sabi, an appreciation of the beauty of the simple. There are definite hints of Art Deco throughout, particularly in the stained glass that fills the upper windows in many of the public spaces. Ironically, though they look modern, their pattern is lifted from pre-historic Japanese pottery that was being excavated at the time the house was designed.

Anyone familiar with the history of architecture will be reminded of the Arts and Crafts Movement in the UK, and even more of Frank Lloyd Wright. The American architect was heavily influenced by Japan, and its architects by him. I can't find any evidence of a link. In fact, Yoshido Sanso isn't even credited to an architect, but to a master carpenter called Nishioka Tsunekazu. But Wright was working in Tokyo less than a decade before Yoshida Sanso was built and I have to believe his thinking spilled over. If you've ever been inside the Robie House at the University of Chicago, or any other "Prairie Style" building, you'll feel that spirit come to life here in a distinctly Japanese incarnation.

One distinct difference, however, is the absence of much furniture. (With the exception of the initial sitting room in which you're welcomed and check out, above.) As any Marie Kondo fan knows, the Japanese are fans of uncluttered spaces, and the great aristocratic homes were primarily broad expanses of tatami-matted space framed by lovely walls. People sat on the floor. Low tables were brought in as needed. Yoshido Sanso isn't that austere. We were welcomed into a sitting room with benches, chairs and a table. Dining rooms have tables and chairs at western height, while our room had two chairs and a small table on the small enclosed balcony and a lower table with half-height chairs in the room, along with our wonderfully comfortable futon on the floor. The sparse furnishing means that the rooms are easily interchangeable. In theory, there are three guest bedrooms and we saw three different dining spaces. But there was little difference between these and, presumably, they could easily be re-purposed as needed.

Heightened design attention goes to the traditional tokonoma, a recessed space in which prized objects are displayed. As with so many things in Japan, of course, there are rules. There should be just three things. One scroll, one flower arrangement and one objet d'art. In our room, it was a scroll of a lusciously elegant Japanese lady in formal kimono holding a rather grumpy cat, a dramatic spray of autumn flowers and a little stack of fine porcelain boxes, each painted with a different insect (see top photo). That's very wabi-sabi for you: I'd never thought of bugs as worthy of artistic attention, but these were exquisite.

While you're enjoying all that interior beauty you'll be treated like the aristocrats for whom the place was built. And while the chairs, English-language hotel information and sprawling double sinks in the shared bathroom might be a nod to Western visitors, the service and the way they use the house is very Japanese. Particularly in the prevailing sense of quiet, and the intense privacy afforded to guests. Somehow, they manage to move people around the house in such a way that you feel you're the only visitors. I think all three rooms were occupied on both nights we stayed, yet I only saw the reflection of other diners in a window on the first and bumped into our next-door neighbours in a hall the next.

We were greeted on our initial arrival by a kimono-clad hostess and welcomed into the sitting room with tea, a traditional Japanese sweet and a poem written in traditional calligraphy by the owner, Kyoko Nakamura, who's a respected practitioner of the art. Several pieces of her work are incorporated into a screen in one of the dining rooms, leaving me to ponder how I can best use the two pieces she sent us home with in our (decidedly not wabi-sabi) home. The heat and bustle of Kyoto fell away in minutes, and soon our stockinged feet were sliding silently over tatami mats to our room. The mats, by the way, are surprisingly springy and a real pleasure to walk on.

Our room was one of two on the upper floor. There's another in the back corner of the ground floor. It was amply-sized, and in the centre lay two thick futon that were probably a bit bigger than a standard twin and thick enough to offer a night's sleep equivalent to being on a good-quality firm mattress with a down mattress topper. If you are of a certain age or lack flexibility, hauling yourself off floor level to head to the bathroom is a bit of a pain, but the quality of sleep in between such necessities is excellent.

Our room had a secondary space along the windows that could be shut off by screens or open to the rest of the room, essentially an enclosed porch. The view was as relaxing as the rest of the place, looking down into the house's traditional gardens and out over the mountains ringing Kyoto. Though the big city is in the valley below, Yoshida Sanso is positioned at an angle so most of it disappears. You just see a bit of suburbia and the roofline of one of the city's dramatic temples.

It's good that the rooms are big because the form here is to stay within them, lounging in beautiful light cotton yukata, or summer-weight kimono, printed with the house's indigo blue take on the imperial chrysanthemum. The sitting room at the front was really only for checking guests in and out. Staff summoned you for meals. Otherwise, your room was your castle. And there's no TV in that room, though there is excellent WiFi so you can stream things like World Cup rugby matches. But considering you're in a house with thin, sliding walls where silence is a virtue you need to do it very quietly.

If you are easily bored or need a lot of stimulation, Yoshida Sanso is not for you. If you want a meditative pause, it's bliss.

Three other things within the grounds might entice you out. The garden is worth a walk, though it's actually quite small and there's no place to sit within it. So you won't be long. There's a small cafe area in a side building in the grounds, but we never saw anyone in it so didn't venture in. The best option was the bathroom. We might not have made it to an onsen, but this came close.

Were it free standing, it would really deserve the name bath house rather than room. Down the back stairs and through another sliding door filled with opaque paper was a wooden-panelled dressing room with racks and baskets to hold your clothes. Beyond that, a large room of brick, stone, wood and tile, with three showers and washing stations along one wall and a tub that could seat three or four in one corner. In another, a precisely-arranged row of wooden buckets and stools. The form is to get clean first, sitting on the stools under the showers. Or fill the buckets with hot water for a bracing splash. Luxurious bath products in dispensers augmented the traditional kit. Then into the piping hot tub for a good soak. (You ask the staff to prepare it for you about half an hour before you want to bathe.) There's only one bathing room, so it's assumed that couples will bathe together so no one hogs the facilities for too long.

The greatest drawback of Yoshida Sanso ... other than its hefty price ... is its hours. Check-in is 4pm at the earliest, check-out by 11. So if you really want to drink in the whole experience and lounge around the place, you do need a 2-night stay. That gives you the day in the middle to relax and live like a Japanese noble. Although I suspect many people stay just a single night, treating it as a restaurant with rooms. Because the cuisine here is amazing. For more on that, read my next story.

A room for two at Yoshida Sanso, with breakfast, is about £800 per night. (It's important to note that the prices on their web site are per person, and not for the room.) Prices vary slightly depending on season and the specific room. The standard dinner is an additional £169 per person and the gourmet dinner is £260 per person, including sake. Interesting to note that the latter is the same price as the tasting menu with sake flight at Michelin starred Umu in London, which I wrote about here.