A Family (and Friends) Affair: Gochiso at Home with Chef Ema Koeda

Two days before our Gochiso Family and Friends Garden Party last month, the weather was cold, wet, and miserable, quite out of character for the unseasonably mild autumn we’d been enjoying.

Needless to say, Chihiro and I were freaking out. We’d planned the event based on the theme of nodate, a tea-party picnic, and had envisioned our guests sitting on the grass, sipping cups of foamy matcha under the trees. We’d even convinced nagauta shamisen perfomer Gojiro Sakamoto (no small feat) to play for us. None of that would work if the weather didn’t cooperate.

We lucked out big time. The gods blessed us with blue skies and one delicious day of Indian summer.



This time, we worked with chef Ema Koeda, whose offer to let us hold the event in the garden of her family’s home in Kamakura gave us the idea for the theme. Ema graduated from the CIA Greystone in Napa, and her specialty is Japanese-slanted California cuisine. We thought that her simple, elegant cooking style would be perfect for the breezy atmosphere of the event, and we challenged her to create gourmet bento boxes for our guests.


She did more than meet the challenge. Ema stuffed the bento boxes with soy-and-sansho glazed chicken drummettes, zingy ginger and broccoli rice, white miso and macadamia nut chocolate chip cookies, and a delicious apple and Satsumaimo crumble cake. The savory items went nicely with the Shimeharizuru Shiboritate sake we served.


As our guests filed into the garden, we walked around passing out the appetizers of sansho-cured lox and homemade ricotta on rice crackers, and delicate lettuce cups filled with calamari and nashi Asian pear salad, while Gojiro Sakamoto began strumming his shamisen. It was a beautiful day.


I first met Ema while covering the CIA World of Flavors conference last year. She was in charge of coordinating all of the Japanese chefs, so we hardly had a chance to talk (the theme of the event was Japan, and it was the first time so many Japanese chefs had ever gathered together in one place). Every so often, I saw her slender frame whiz by as I negotiated my way through the crowds.

We reconnected this summer when she came to our Gochiso Food Is Art dinner event, and have been getting together to talk food and drink ever since. I’ve even seen her on the job (she’s a freelance restaurant consultant), but I hadn’t sat down with her to talk about her background until just the other day.

Funny what you can discover about a person if you just ask. She was born in Iran (!) and lived between New York and Tokyo for most of her childhood. Although she’s one of the most flawlessly bilingual people I’ve ever met, she didn’t really learn Japanese until she came back to Japan for university.

While getting her business degree at Boston College, she realized that she wanted to work with food.

“English wasn’t the native language for a lot of the students there, so food became a communication tool,” she told me. “It was our main bond.”

When she moved back to Tokyo, she didn’t waste any time getting a job as a restaurant consultant with Suntory. She didn’t have any experience, but she was armed with a natural confidence and the focused determination of a former high-school tennis champ. Suntory put her to work in their restaurants, and during her nearly four years with the company, she learned how to create a restaurant from scratch: everything from developing the concept and menu, to coordinating the interior and finding a chef to match.

But she knew that if she wanted to move forward as a restaurant consultant and really support chefs, she would have to have a better understanding of how a chef works. So she enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America, as one does.


Now, in addition to restaurant consulting, she works with the US Embassy promoting American products in Japan and vice versa. When she’s not doing food coordination for magazines or working on cookbooks, she travels to find inspiration for new recipes.

Her most recent adventure took her down to Kagoshima, with the television program Kitchen ga Hashiru , where she hunted for local ingredients and cooked alongside celebrity chef Hiroyuki Sakai, of Iron Chef fame. As she described the miso chutney she made -- a modern take on a Kyushu recipe of miso sautéed with sugar and bonito flakes -- I couldn’t help drooling a little, especially when she told me that it was used to garnish a kurobuta pork confit (I have a weakness for confit of all kinds).

We’re so glad we had the chance to collaborate with Chef Ema on Family and Friends, and we definitely hope she’ll agree to work with us again.

The Kagoshima episode of Kitchen ga Hashiru will air on NHK on December 30, at 7:30pm. Be sure to check it out!

Thanks to Chihiro Moriyama, Shizuka Wakashita, and Kiyoko Sagane for the images.