Batter up: A visit to a Tokyo temple of tempura

In Tokyo, you can buy a meal of tempura -- batter-fried seafood and vegetables -- for $10 or $15 in the basement food section of a department store and munch on it, tepid and soggy -- though tasty enough -- in your hotel room. Or you can eat tempura sitting comfortably in an ordinary restaurant: One of the options for the final course in a soba (buckwheat noodle) restaurant, for instance, is plain noodles with a side order of tempura.

Or you can go to an ATM, extract roughly $200 in cash per person and make your way to Rakutei, a tempura restaurant in Akasaka: 11 seats at an L-shaped counter; one chef, one assistant; one vase with one flower; one sweet, motherly waitress in kimono.

Now, there are smart people who feel that tempura is a lunchbox dish, people like Rick Kennedy, a longtime resident of Japan and the author of "Little Adventures in Tokyo." He was baffled by my interest in "high-end" tempura. "The thing is," he e-mailed me before I left for Japan, "tempura is really no big deal." That may be true for someone who has lived in Tokyo for decades, but I can tell you that I'm glad I didn't let him dissuade us from dinner at Rakutei.

We'd eaten tempura before on this trip, at a bustling and otherwise very good soba restaurant (Daian), as one among many dishes. The selection was pedestrian: shrimp and a few vegetables. Because it had been brought from kitchen to table in a pile, the tempura was not especially hot and not especially crisp. It was, however, especially oily. Cheap, though: Excellent soba with a side order of blah tempura cost about $12. (The other options there were delicious.)

Rakutei, on the other hand, was about almost nothing but tempura, and dinner there was a highlight of our two-week trip. Like the decor, the menu is simple. The evening's roughly $120 succession of tempura is determined by the season and market availability and is served to all comers, Japanese and Westerners alike: no language barrier; no being treated differently from locals. The only option is whether to spend an extra $30 on pre-tempura sashimi, which we did. Drinks cost another $30 a head: beer, then sake (chosen with the help of the waitress, who spoke some English), then tea.

The chef, Mr. Ishikura (a surname was all that could be discovered) , has been doing this for more than 30 years, and watching him from across the counter was spellbinding. When we arrived, he was clearing the decks for the evening's final 11 diners. As we drank beer and ate what a fancy French restaurant would call amuse-bouches (including a warm seaweed salad with fresh sweet bamboo shoots), he began to prepare -- not for tempura-frying, but for our sashimi. Working at an unhurried pace you rarely witness in a Western restaurant kitchen, he held his knife almost flat on a cylinder of daikon radish and turned the root against the blade, producing an utterly even, nearly tissue-thin strip, like paper coming off a roll. Having cut that into rectangles, he stacked them and, with tranquil elegance, slivered them into perfect micro-shreds. He then lingeringly contemplated several fish fillets and gracefully, with long, smooth strokes of his knife, cut the fish needed for four portions of sashimi. Thirty-six bite-size slices of fish and a little haystack of daikon shreds took Mr. Ishikura 20 peaceful minutes -- during which we could not take our eyes off him.

Only now did tempura enter the picture. Another quarter of an hour was devoted to shelling shrimp, trimming their tails to make them visually pleasing and scoring their flesh so that they would not curl up when cooked. After that, vegetables were peeled and trimmed. Fish were filleted with almost incredible skill. The 3/8 -inch-thick flesh of broad-mantle squid was cut into rectangles and scored. Fresh oil was poured (no thermometer, much less thermostat: just a shallow pan about 18 inches across sitting on a gas burner). Batter was mixed in a little bowl (later adjusted as required, with more flour or more liquid added to achieve the right consistency for a given ingredient).

The waitress set out dishes of salt, lemon, dipping sauce and grated daikon, along with a draining rack topped with white paper folded in half, but just off-kilter, for beauty's sake. The whoosh of a powerful gas burner and the whir of an exhaust fan were the only sounds in the room. Frying was under way.

The sequence began with the most typical of tempura: shrimp. One sweet shrimp, its batter pale and softly crisp, was served to each diner. Then another shrimp, and another, each fresh out of the fryer. A springtime specialty, the shoots of the Japanese angelica tree -- taranoki -- came next, tasting rather like tiny artichokes. Something that looked like a thumbnail-size crab but turned out to be the head of one of those shrimp, shorn of its antennae and other protrusions, was a study in crispness and whimsy. A little pile of translucent icefish (like whitebait, but smaller, slimmer and paler); a whitinglike fish called kisu, its two fillets joined at the tail; more springtime: fava beans mixed with batter and fried into a crisp clump. Then a spicy lollipop: immature ginger, the bulb dipped in batter and fried, held by its red stalk. That thick rectangle of squid followed, tender and sweet, then conger eel, each piece split in two with a crunch by the chef's stainless-steel cooking chopsticks before serving.

Every course was so close to perfection that we almost never resorted to the dipping sauce except to confirm that it was delicious, and rarely even to the lemon. A few grains of salt were all that was needed.

Finally, another crisp clump emerged from the oil, this time of tiny scallops: kobashira. Many Japanese meals end with a rice course, and this was the focal point of ours. The scallop pancake was offered plain, with rice on the side; atop a bowl of rice, first glazed in sauce; or on a bowl of rice with light tea poured over it. We were three, so we took one of each. The best choice, by far, was the third. There is something appealing about the way a liquid affects crisp-fried batter, and that appeal was heightened by the delicacy of each element of the dish.

For the first time, as the chef and his assistant tidied up behind the counter, we felt frustration at not being able to speak Japanese so that we could tell them what a pleasure it had been to watch them work and how glad we were that we'd made this the final meal of our trip. This frustration was fleeting as we found ourselves the object of one more demonstration of hospitality. When she saw us consulting our street map (rather pointlessly, as we had only the vaguest idea of where we were), the waitress, wearing wooden sandals (surely not made for striding along paved sidewalks), walked us to within sight of the subway station, a good 10 minutes away.

All this -- the cooking, the seasonal menu, the display of skill, the way we were cared for -- added up to so much more than fried shrimp. It is something we won't soon forget, and unlike the greasy pile of tempura at Daian, something we won't want to.

Edward Schneider, a freelance writer in New York, looks forward to having enough frequent-flier miles for his next trip to Japan.