Do you know the Nikkei cuisine yet?
Tuna temaki with quinoa, tiger’s milk with ginger and dashi, or miso soup with hearts of palm and chili. Is your mouth watering yet? Then Nikkei cuisine is definitely for you.
Nikkei cuisine is known as Japanese-Peruvian cuisine. But actually, Nikkei is the term for people of Japanese descent who live abroad, meaning Nikkei cuisine can be found wherever Japanese immigrants and their descendants are. And Peru just happens to be home to the second-largest Japanese community in the world (after Brazil).
Ceviche, Japanese-style
At the end of the nineteenth century, many Japanese people moved to Peru to work on plantations along the coast. The Japanese stayed true to their own cuisine, while using local ingredients.
But that’s not all; they also took on Peruvian classics such as ceviche. Instead of marinating it for hours in tiger’s milk, lime, onion and coriander, as the Peruvians do, they prepared it the Japanese way: stirring the fish through tiger’s milk with dashi and ginger at the last moment. Voilà: Japanese-Peruvian Nikkei cuisine was born.
Nikkei in the Netherlands
More than a century later, around 1980, chef Nobu Matsuhisa made the cuisine known around the world. And now we can enjoy it in the Netherlands too. At Maita restaurant in Haarlem, for example, Soulkitchen in Amsterdam or BlueBlood in The Hague.
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