Bric-a-Brac 36
Our mega-Moodboard for Japan's reopening, the women who can take you way beyond Kyoto, and photographer Andrea Gentl's mushroom map of the world
ARMCHAIR TRAVELER
Andrea Gentl is an award-winning food and travel photographer and a dear friend who we’ve worked with for years. In collaboration with her husband and partner, Martin Hyers, her photos for basically every major lifestyle magazine and cookbook publisher are always soulfully transporting, capturing a fleeting sense of time through light—a gently fading pile of temple flowers in Kolkata, an artfully messy, glinting plate of sardines in Andros, Greece.
But Andrea’s latest project, Cooking With Mushrooms: A Fungi Lover’s Guide to the World’s Most Versatile, Flavorful, Health-Boosting Ingredients, is entirely her own. Incorporating both wild and cultivated mushrooms, her recipes—Adaptogenic Mushroom Honey, Morels on Fried Sourdough with Smashed Favas and Peas, Pork Chops with Maitake and Plums—and deep-dives into finding and using different varieties, demystify this strange and health-boosting ingredient. Many of the recipes were inspired by Andrea’s wide-ranging travels, so we asked her to share a few of the destinations and dishes that sparked her imagination.
Preorder the book here by October 18 to get a signed, limited-edition print.
By Andrea Gentl
Mushrooms have been in my life forever, but it wasn’t until I wrote Cooking With Mushrooms that I realized this. A child of the 1970s, mine was a feral childhood spent happily in fields, woods and streams. I could pass hours in a very macro world of moss and lichen, collecting anything and everything that caught my eye. My pockets were often filled with acorns and leaves, my shirt constantly stained by muddy rocks and plump mushrooms clinging to bits of forest floor. I climbed our giant pine, swaying and swooshing in the wind, hands covered in pitch, reveling in the fact that no one could find me. When I left for college, I left the woods and the fields behind me, and I didn’t reconnect for many years. It was travel and photography that brought me back.
Everywhere I went, I was consistently drawn to nature and, more often than not, to mushrooms. First on assignment, shooting the inimitable Connie Green, the Bay Area’s incredible mushroom hunter. She supplied the best of Northern California’s restaurants for many years with wild mushrooms. We met her at dawn at Sea Ranch and went deep into the woods along the coast. Before long, we had our mushroom eyes on, and soon her basket was overflowing with fungi of all colors and shapes. We returned to Sea Ranch and cooked the mushrooms in a bath of butter punctuated only by a bit of salt and pepper. We piled the cooked mushrooms onto large crunchy pieces of toast; it was nothing short of a spiritual experience.
As touristy as the Rialto Market of Venice is, it will always be one of my favorites, perhaps because I spent my twenty-first birthday in Venice while on exchange in Siena. At certain times of the year, the market is teeming with fresh, plump porcini from the nearby Dolomites. When they aren’t in season, I bring home several bags of dried mushrooms. Along with the Rialto market, two others I never miss are the Campo Dei Fiori and the Trastevere markets in Rome. Campo Dei Fiori is pretty touristy these days, but there are still a few authentic stalls; one is the porcini vendor, who also sells giant unopened pine cones stuffed with delicious pine nuts—you must know how to coax them from their closed world, but that’s another story. Finally, the Trastevere market, on the hip side of the river, is another spot I always hit for unusual comestibles.
Another assignment that brought me closer to nature was in the far north of Sweden, where I traveled to photograph chef Magnus Nielsen of Faviken. This was right at the beginning of the Nordic food movement; time and place were of the utmost importance. We spent three days with Magnus, trailing him in his impeccable laboratory kitchen walking with him in the woods as he picked mushrooms and lichen (Old Man’s Beard). What struck me about Magnus was how much he respected the woods. He never overpicked. In the evening, we ate the most incredible meal. The lichen was flash fried and served with pine salt; it was like nothing I had ever eaten. That trip changed the way I thought about food and my cooking.
I started to think back to my upbringing in Western Mass, where I had seen lichens similar to the ones I ate in Sweden. I started to think about my own story in time and place, which was the beginning of my culinary journey. When I think now about fungi, I see that they’re so much more than food. Mushrooms rarely leave the news cycle: this speaks not only to their culinary delight, but to medicine and biotech companies at the forefront of fungal inventions.
My favorite local New York City bite is the grilled mushrooms with smoked Scamorza at Via Carota in the West Village. It is divine. And I recently had the most delicious charcuterie with corn smut fungus from Cochonneries of Brooklyn. There is no end in sight to the tasty mushroom.
My most revered mushroom discovery I found not in some foreign land, but close to home. As I traveled a road I had been on at least twice daily in my young life, I found a sign. We had just closed on my father’s house, which was sold to a friend. It was a bittersweet day. As I drove away from the place I had grown up, for the last time, my eyes scanned the tall oaks along the roadside where I had hundreds of times stuffed my pockets. Then, right where the road curved, I looked to my left and yelled “Stop, pull over!” to my husband. There, in plain sight at the base of an ancient oak nestled and tucked into a bed of layered Carmel leaves and abandoned acorns, lay the biggest, lushest Maitake I had ever seen. It was a cosmic message from my father and a reminder that magic is around every bend.
MOODBOARD
The two Instagram accounts we can’t stop scrolling through.
The Tokyo list you need to save - from our friend David Coggins, who has been to Japan countless times.
At this Airbnb in Yoshino, the village is the host.
When our friend hosted a yakitori dinner party, we enlisted our biggest audiophile friend Jeff Whipps to make this playlist for the night.
One of our favorite cookbook authors, Emiko Davies, returned to see family in Japan after years away—and is writing about her favorite addresses in Tokyo in an upcoming newsletter.
Experience Japan’s revered culinary traditions on one of these intimate, seasonally tailored retreats in the countryside.
THE NAVIGATOR
Julia Maeda & Lauren Scharf, OKUNI Co-Founders
Tell us about you/your company
Okuni is an onsite destination management company for Japan. We are also a concierge service in the level of personal detail we apply to every trip. And we are fixers; working with professionals of all kinds, getting them to the people and places they need to meet and see.
Our goal is to plan phenomenal trips for our clients, taking them deep into the country and its complex culture. To do that well takes time and excellent partners. We scour Japan to find the most luxurious ryokan, most interesting design hotels, most original experiences and activities, best local guides and best local cuisine.
Julia—originally from England—has lived mainly in Tokyo for over 25 years, the last 10 working in the travel sector. Lauren, the U.S.-born co-founder of The Art of Travel before teaming up with Julia to found Okuni in 2018, has lived on and off in Japan since 1990, and is now based on Japan’s Noto Peninsula. We specialize in off-the-beaten-track, even if clients are visiting Tokyo or Kyoto, as we both entered this business from a desire to support Japan’s lesser-known locations, artisans, and local communities.
What’s the entry level to talk to you?
A planning fee of JPY15,000 (roughly $100) per person per day. Our trips generally start at $1,500 per person, per day.
What is the sweet spot of your expertise?
Introducing clients to people and experiences that can only be accessed due to our relationships and connections.
A favorite experience/trip you’ve planned that best represents your philosophy…
We received a request from a favorite agent to plan a trip for a lovely family of five who were interested in an active holiday, learning about the culture and spirituality of Japan, as well as supporting local communities. They were happy to trust us to propose anything (the best type of client!) so we sent them to Tohoku to spend four days in the mountains on a pilgrimage with the Yamabushi (mountain priests). They also spent time with a local artisan and stayed in a beautiful hotel designed by Shigeru Ban surrounded by rice fields.
A favorite hotel/lodge/house you love and go back to again and again…
There is a particular ryokan in Kurashiki that we adore, as well as a private villa in Nara and a wonderful boutique hotel in Kyoto. The common theme is the host/hostess, who elevates the experience and ensures that the service provided is superlative.
The most memorable meal you’ve had while traveling in Japan…
We were invited to stay at the newly opened Azumi Setoda (Aman designer Adrian Zecha’s passion-project in the Japanese Inland Sea). Not many people know that Japan was the terminus of the Silk Road, and as a center for maritime trade during the Middle Ages, Setouchi was a stop for herbs and spices from all over the world. Using locally sourced ingredients, Azumi prepares Japanese fusion dishes that incorporate the imported spices and serves them on dishes collected from many countries.
A not-to-be-missed favorite experience in your region of expertise…
In the right season, foraging for sansai (mountain greens) on Sado Island with a Michelin trained chef.
What is a place we should consider traveling to that could really use our dollars, and what is a place we should put on hold because, even though we love it, it sees too many tourists?
Tohoku, in particular the 2011 tsunami-hit Eastern coast. People do not realize that Fukushima is a huge prefecture (state) that is so much more than the nuclear exclusion zone. Avoid Kyoto; you can see similar, if not better, places in other areas of Japan with the key sights that people want to see in Kyoto; it only requires more time and financial commitment.
Underrated location, overrated location, personal favorite, recent discovery?
During the pandemic, we used our downtime to seek out new locations and were particularly entranced by the stretch of the Japan Sea Coast from Ine (also known as Kyoto-by-Sea) down through Tottori, Shimane and down to Yamaguchi at bottom of Japan’s main island of Honshu. We discovered some wonderful people, including a self-confessed alien/wood artist and a Brit who is almost single-handedly saving Japan’s giant salamander; gorgeous ryokan, including one in a tiny village in Yamaguchi whose presence is regenerating the entire town; and the most amazing cultural experiences from an ancient form of storytelling dance held in local shrines to worshiping with monks on one of Japan’s most sacred mountains.
What is something you wished we all knew or were better at as travelers?
One of our pet peeves is when people tell us that they want an “authentic” travel experience when what they actually mean is that they want their image of what Japan is based on movies and Instagram. When people tell us they want “authentic,” they are usually imagining old wooden buildings, small temples, people in kimono wandering the streets….In actual fact the Japanese live a very modern life, and your average Japanese person lives in an apartment, eats toast for breakfast, goes to Starbucks for coffee, eats at tables rather than on the floor, and rarely (if ever) wears a kimono.
How do you want people to reach out to you?
We are generally a referral only-business, but people can reach out by Instagram: @tokyopersonalised or @nippondiscovery
Book marking all of this. And thank you for including my upcoming Tokyo guide in my newsletter -- it is a long one and will be out on Monday morning! ;)
Loving all this Japan intel. Thank you for sharing this. Just a small correction, Adrian Zecha was the founder and original owner and developer of Amanresorts, and not the designer. He collaborated with a handful of incredible architects including the late Ed Tuttle, the late Kerry Hill, and the alive and kicking Jean Michel Gathy.