MASAYO
FUNAKOSHI
Chef
ISSUE 1 2024 SS
Masayo Funakoshi is the chef helming Farmoon, who studied sculpture at Pratt Institute and
expanded her expression through culinary creations. She learned cooking in New York, traveled around the world by working in various restaurants, and then chose Kyoto to base her career. In the hope of finding Funakoshi’s definition of food, let us explore the origins of her imagination and expression.
Located near Ginkakuji temple of Kyoto, Masayo Funakoshi’s restaurant Farmoon welcomes you with a comfortable wide-open space with a vaulted ceiling as you walk in. Funakoshi teamed up with designer Teruhiro Yanagihara to convert an old Japanese house into her ideal place. The key was Funakoshi’s devotion for a circular table. Together they figured out ways to accommodate her dream by not focusing too much on actual size and dimension of the house, but relied on their intuitive senses to decide the length and width of the kitchen and tables. Then they hand marked the layout on the floor, which eventually became a blueprint of the restaurant. Funakoshi particularly wanted to place a circular table which allows smooth communication among everyone around by looking at each other in the eye. She grew up surrounding a circular table with her family, and also experienced the same eating style when she visited families and restaurants in China. Realizing how circular tables can offer a homely out the best distance between people. A large circular table at Farmoon is created by wood sculptor Hideki Takayama by combining old and
used wood. At night, Farmoon turns into a “members only” style restaurant where guests must be introduced and offers no specific menu. There, the slow flow of time and comfortable atmosphere is one of a kind, as if you are invited into a foreigner’s home, a breakaway from the ordinary.
Funakoshi grew up in an environment where art was very familiar, and she loved drawing and crafting since she was a child. She started studying art seriously as she got into the art department of a fine arts high school in Tokyo. On weekends, her father invited many business guests from overseas to his home. Funakoshi loved to gather around the table with the guests while enjoying her mother’s feast, and this is where her ideal concept was formed. Soon, she felt she could do more than just helping out her mother in the kitchen, and started to cook using old English recipe books from the wagon in front of the used book store in the neighborhood. Her passion for cooking bloomed as she learned to make people happy with her cooking. Then, she enrolled herself in Pratt Institute in New York and majored in sculpture. There, she used a technique called “casting” by using a mold to make a sculpture. She often selected food for sculpting material, but soon became frustrated to express her passion for food through art. She ended up transferring to a cooking school for professionals, and started to learn cooking seriously. This is when she met her long-time mentor Michael Anthony, which led her to work for him as an intern. Then she gained more experience as a chef in many renowned restaurants. Her journey continued on as she moved to France to learn French cuisine, travelled many different countries to pick up a variety of local dishes, became a chef for an Australian cruise ship and also at a long-established hotel Tandjung Sari in Bali. In 2012, she settled down in Kyoto and completed her own culinary style by weaving her experiences from different cultures with her unique sense of taste.
What is Funakoshi’s definition of cooking? Her answer was to first play in her mind the season, the combination of ingredients and the type of guests that are coming that day. She keeps a very simple style by limiting food on one plate, by focusing on two main ingredients and adding just a touch of something to make those ingredients stand out. “Of course I try to balance color, texture and taste. But the most important thing is the ingredient itself,” she says. For instance, she knows that oyster and raw carrots go well together. It cannot be explained, it is just a flash of inspiration that comes up when she looks at the ingredients. Her creation is based on her childhood experiments of self-learning and cooking, and reinforced by many different cooking methods and ingredients she has gathered from around the world and stored within herself. It even goes back to her days at the art institute where she was always thinking about materials and why she selected them. When cooking, Funakoshi considers herself as a “mediator” who expresses many things through her culinary creation; passion and love of farmers, today’s atmosphere, season, space and location all matter to her. She considers it as a very passive situation. Same can be said when she visits a new place to cook. She takes local field work very seriously, and spends much time reading references and doing research. However, once she is set off to cook, she leaves her emotions and intentions out of the process, and just concentrates on what comes out of her in that very place and at that very moment.
“I want to concentrate when I cook,and I don’t want to be bothered by other things. That is why I want everything to be in the right place for me. I also want my gestures to be beautiful,” she says. This may be the influence of her grandmother and her mother who practiced tea ceremony, which is known for its great hospitality created by beautiful atmosphere featuring season and nature. When we asked her about the most satisfying moment as a culinary creator, she mentioned her joint experience with the guests. She serves the dishes, the guests enjoy them, and there comes a moment where everyone’s excitement and smiles just fill up the air. It does not occur frequently, but when it does, she feels that deep emotion with all her senses. She also pointed out that cooking aroma is very important. People enjoy eating using five (or sometimes six) senses, and it could make them happy but it could also kill them if used in the wrong way. That is why she tries to be very sincere when she cooks, keeping the sense of life and death within her at all times.
Being a very eager person, Funakoshi is constantly open to challenging new things and continues to be very active as an artist. “Edible Landscape”, a project held in Nara, Japan and in Bali, Indonesia, is an installation where she goes to a place, prepares food using local ingredients, shares the table with everyone and creates a landscape at the end. Lastly, we asked her what her signature dish is. She answered, “My motto is to eat the moment, smell the moment and taste the moment. So, the dish changes constantly.” After the interview, we were given an opportunity to photograph a semifreddo featuring “Ume no Jin,” a white nut wrapped in a thin skin taken out from the plum seed and pickled in vodka for nearly one year. It is a blend of meringue, plum flower petal, cream, almond and crumbles in perfect balance, sitting inside a simple black bowl. Its crispy texture and beautiful form certainly are noteworthy, but it is by no doubt the experience itself is what makes it so exceptional. Funakoshi described that this dessert is inspired by the landscape image where snowflakes sprinkle over the plum flower petals scattered on the ground. It looked like a piece of art or a recollection of past travels. Either way, it felt like standing in front of a nostalgic scenery, a gentle encounter to the past.
FARMOON
9, Kitashirakawa Higashikubota-cho,
Sakyo-ku Kyoto-shi, Kyoto, 606-8285, Japan
TEA SALON (no reservations required)
FRI to SUN 11:00 – 16:00
Instagram:@masayofunakoshi,@farmoon_kyoto
PHOTOGRAPHY: Stefan Dotter
INTERVIEW: Reiko Ishii
Questionnaire
1
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What do you do?
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Cooking. Also creating the space and time for people to eat.
2
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Tell us what you love the most about your job.
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Unrepeatable
3
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What made you start your current job?
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Carpe diem. Seize the day.
4
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Who are the most influential persons in your life?
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Hildegard von Bingen.
She taught me how important to become yourself as an empty vessel.
5
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Describe yourself in 3 words
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Medium, intuition, primitive
6
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What is the thing that you are very interested in now?
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Spatial thinking
7
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What are three things you cannot live without?
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Comrade, project, good conversation
8
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What do you always have on you?
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Agate gua sha
9
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Tell us about your morning routine.
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Stretching, have a cup of hot tea from my tea selections, and call my fish guy at 9.
10
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What is your favorite drink?
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Water from Cedar tree which my architect friend made the system to collect them by the process of drying the cedar wood for construction use.
11
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What do you get immersed in, losing track of time?
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Profiling and matching the ingredients in my imagination.
12
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What is the ultimate luxury for you?
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Floating in water. No gravity feeling.
13
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When do you feel stimulated or inspired?
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When we could have great conversation sharing our knowledge and thought to encourage our creativity each other.
14
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What is your favorite color?
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Magenta
15
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What is your favorite taste of food?
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Slight bitterness in early Spring.
16
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What is the most important decision you have made in your life?
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Shifted my career from sculpture to cooking.
17
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What was the most moving moment in your life?
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When I swimmed in open water of Papua New Guinea by myself. Been in just blue and nothingness.
18
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What is the most recent book you have finished reading?
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An Imaginary History of Architecture by Yoshitake Doi
19
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Who is your favorite author?
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Yo Henmi
20
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What are your three favorite books on the bookshelf?
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Saishi Shuzoku Jiten by Kunio Yanagita, The Emperor of Scent by Chandler Burr,
Kumagusu Life and Spirituality by Reiji Ando
21
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Where would you like to go for a trip?
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Central Asia
22
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Which country would you like to visit in the future?
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Nations where I’ve never been.
23
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Where is your favorite hotel?
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Villa Naga, my friend Asmeen’s villa in Bali.
24
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What is the most memorable place you've visited?
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Can’t pick one.
25
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Where is home for you?
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Farmoon which is neutral and transformative.
26
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What is your favorite recent song?
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Old movie soundtrack
27
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Who’s your favorite singer?
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Nina Simone
28
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What is the one song you can listen to all the time?
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Bach
29
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What are your three favorite movies?
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Zelig by Woody Allen
Babette’s Feast by Gabriel Axel
Tampopo by Juzo Itami
30
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What are some of your favorite movies you've seen recently?
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Dune: Part Two by Denis Villeneuve
31
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When you meet someone for the first time, what is the first point that catches your eye?
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The eyes
32
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Which word do you use to greet friends?
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Heyyyy!
33
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What is the best advice you have received from people?
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Don’t think..feel. lol
34
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What do you wear in bed?
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Gauze one-piece by Black Crane
35
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What is your motto?
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“Be like water.” I guess I love Bruce Lee so much!
