Japanese Cuisine UNKAKU

Shimamura was born in a seaside city in Wakayama Prefecture. Being so close to the ocean meant he would go fishing every week in elementary school, fishing and cooking by himself. He also enjoyed helping his mother cook and they would make sweets together.

After graduating from the famous Tsuji Culinary Institute, he worked in a Japanese cuisine restaurant in Kitashinchi, Osaka.

A strong desire fueled him to open up a shop and start his own business, and after nine years working at the restaurant the time seemed right to make a leap.

So, Shimamura went independent to start a place of his own.

At first, UNKAKU opened in between Osaka's Kitahama and Yodoyabashi areas. While UNKAKU is based on Japanese food, it also incorporated creative elements into its style and cuisine.

After UNKAKU opened, Shimamura started going to seminars to search for new ingredients. While doing this, he discovered that Osaka City itself has various traditional vegetables.

He also came across the Osaka Cooking Association, and started to actively participate. This association was (and still is) a great place to learn about Osaka's ingredients and cooking methods, so Shimamura could methodically hone his skills here.

The association taught Shimamura about one concept in particular that strongly affected what he does - Osaka cuisine.

Of course, you don't make Osaka cuisine by just using Osaka's traditional ingredients, and Shimamura understood this.

While Osaka cuisine does take advantage of Osaka city itself and its fresh ingredients being at the forefront, its key characteristics are putting ingredients first. This focuses on flavor, using Japan’s regional ingredients, kelp broth, and the spirit of minimizing waste.

Since his store was in Osaka, he wanted to convey a local charm and do more than simply use Osakan goods.

Note: The Osaka Cooking Association (大阪料理協会) is a study group focused on Japanese cuisine, where cooks and chefs learn about ingredients and cooking methods with a distinct focus on Osaka. Kappo-style and other Osaka-inspired restaurants gather and exchange opinions and information through monthly presentations and tasting sessions.

The explanations above come from The Osaka Cooking Association's website, and you can find more information here (Japanese language only.)

A specialty dish at UNKAKU emphasises Osaka Cuisine. Shimamura calls it Nozaki-yaki.

Sea bream approximately 18cm long are slowly cooked with canola oil from Nozaki in Osaka's Daito City, preventing moisture loss. This cooking process creates a meal that has a crispy, fragrant surface with fluffy flesh that can be enjoyed without waste. The head, bones, and scales are all edible!

As the canola oil is a key ingredient and Nozaki has long been a major producer of it, Shimamura pays homage to the area by naming the dish after it.

That said, this food is not all that Shimamura makes. He is also ingenious with crafting sweets!

During winter, Shimamura will make a special turnip-shaped manju dessert (seen further above) using Tennōji kabura or Tennōji turnip. Buried deep in rice bran, there is an enjoyment behind digging up the kabura and "harvesting" it.

This is also part of Shimamura's ethos to introduce traditional vegetables to a wider audience, all while creating an enjoyable experience - and delicious food!

Shimamura is more than just a chef, or even a food researcher. He commits time to biotechnology as well, at least when it comes to food.

Food technology was Shimamura's original interest, reading much literature on the subject and keeping up with cutting-edge technology supporting the culinary industry. However, life had different plans for him, and he was not able to actively get involved in that field.

During this time, he gained an interest in cultured meat (also called cultivated meat), made by culturing animal cells. Cultured meat has already started entering some markets such as in Australia, Singapore, and America, and is set to explode in popularity in the coming years.

Shimamura had the opportunity to meet a university professor studying cultured meat at a biotech related event, giving him the chance to see the product first-hand. At the time, it seemed quite rare that a chef would visit a research institute, and the fellow researchers there found it quite amusing.

He wanted to try the cultured meat and experience it first hand. However, such products made in universities have failsafes in place such as ethics reviews, which prevented him from trying cultured meat after all.

Instead, Shimamura started Diverse Farm, a company that works in conjunction with others in biotech to carry out research together. Currently, they are working on research to explore the potential of cultured meat from the perspective of a chef.

Cultured meat is not where Shimamura's research ends. He is also researching and exploring uses of unused fish.

While his cuisine usually centers on wild-caught fish, the decline in marine resources makes it essential, according to Shimamura, to actively utilize underused species and farmed fish in order to ensure a sustainable food future. These types of fish are what we call unused fish.

A good example of an unused fish is mottled spinefoot (siganus fuscescens) or aigo in Japanese, seen above.

In Japan, aigo is mostly found in its southern seas, commonly fished in Okinawa and Kagoshima Prefectures. However, with the rise of sea temperatures in recent years, the aigo's habitat has strated to spread further north. This has led to aigo being caught in territories that have no food culture behind using it, so they are sometimes discarded.

Aigo are also herbivores, which causes concern for seaweed and seaweed farms which have not had to deal with this fish invading their areas before.

With that in mind, Shimamura is the CEO of RelationFish, running this company with other cooks and chefs that share similar aspirations - researching and using unused fish.

When it comes to aigo, he believes that we can take advantage of it being herbivorous, creating aigo farms where they are fed with discarded vegetable waste and orange juice residue and byproducts.

Another step forward in the world of environmentally friendly farming.

While it might seem unusual for a chef to be active in the field of research, Shimamura has been interested in science since he was a child.

At the same time, he was interested in being a cook and trying many different things.

The reason Shimamura chose to become a chef was his belief that if he became a fully-fledged chef, he could also be involved in science.

This turned into a natural flow of becoming a chef that is involved in the development of sustainable ingredients and cultured meat.

The main difficulty Shimamura encounters with both fields is time. There is only so much time in the day, and it is hard to combine multiple activities or pursuits in that limited time.

In the world of biotech, Shimamura is still accumulating basic research and foundations, because it is still a future field.

He believes creating something new on his own is not only challenging, but also enjoyable.

Shimamura states that he loves Sakai Ichimonji Mitsuhide's kitchen knives, especially thin-style gyuto and hamokiri (Conger Pike eel knives).

While he often visits Doguyasuji, he naturally started using Ichimonji knives. For a kitchen knife, Shimamura is looking for a sense of unity that is not only in sharpness, but in familiarity to the hand - feeling like a natural extension of himself.

He sharpens his knives every two to three days, keeping them at their maximum potential.

For the future, Shimamura aims to promote the concept of sustainable food.

But, he also believes you can't only put out that message. If you do, it could come off as preachy, which turns away people who just want to enjoy good cooking.

The balance is delicate, but he aims to create a place where one can casually feel and notice food sustainability and consideration for the environment, all while putting the food first.

Our Japanese YouTube team also filmed a mini video documentary on Shimamura and Japanese Cuisine UNKAKU. Enjoy the video below.

Please note it only officially has Japanese audio and subtitles, but automatic translations are available. Nuance and meaning may be lost though, so please refer back to the original Japanese as fact over any translations.

Chef Shimamura has been a customer of ours for many years, and used a large variety of our kitchen knives in his culinary and scientific journeys.

Below is a list of just some of his favorites and recommended knives from us.