Umami tunes

If you go to Tokyo, there's a good chance you'll develop a new appreciation for shopping malls. The Japanese know malls. They know just what to do with them. Inside a Tokyo mall, you can peruse the usual handbags and shoes in their unending variety. But you can also stare at Fuji apples as large as a baby's head swaddled in tissue paper, flip through the world's most exquisite stationery, stock up on fabric from the 1920s, and taste things that will haunt you well into retirement.

- BY ALEX HALBERSTADT

I remember having my first serious sushi in Tokyo on the top floor of a Ginza mall. My partner and I were led into a private room where a chef who didn't speak a word of English prepared one of the four or five best meals I'd eaten. Everything we needed to know was conveyed by the languid movements of his $2000 sashimi blade and the look of pride on his face. There was snow crab as sweet as a Georgia peach, a sliver of tuna belly as intense as foie gras, buttery amberjack, upsettingly fresh salmon roe. The sea urchin that the chef took out of a cedar box and placed in front of me was so explosively flavorful that it rang in my head like a bell. But the thing I remember best was the first course, a small, lacquered bowl of miso soup. Unlike the watery, yellowish stuff you might know from your neighborhood sushi joint, this miso soup was the color of blackstrap molasses and suffused with umami flavor of such depth that it lingered in my mouth for the rest of the meal.

The savory, deeply satisfying flavor that is umami was scientifically identified in 1908 by Kikunae Ikeda, a professor at Tokyo Imperial University. Ikeda noticed that a broth made from kombu, a seaweed, had a flavor that was distinct from the four basic tastes: sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. When evaporated, the broth left behind brown crystals, which he identified as glutamic acid. Ikeda named the flavor umami and, later, patented a method of mass-producing the crystals in the form of a food additive called monosodium glutamate.