Karaku starts with the safflower. Its pressed seeds yield oil. Said oil fries lightly battered food items: shrimp, wrapped in shiso leaves, or not; pumpkin; cuttlefish; gingko nuts; meaty bailing mushrooms. Karaku presses this parade of tempura into various set menus, accentuated variously with sashimi, an appetizer course, expensive beef -- or all three! -- and yields high bills.

This is the premise. Many courses of very expensive tempura. I ate 12 pieces last week, and then tendon, a fritter of shrimp and vegetables over rice, with pickles, and four other courses besides. It was 690rmb, but because you can't get a private room unless you've committed to spending at least 1,380rmb (two people in a private room must take the 690rmb menu; three people can do the leaner 490rmb option), and that doesn't include drinks or a 10% service charge, it was much more. Heavy on the wallet, light on the stomach.

Karaku is a beautiful place to be in exile. It's a very large building in Xuhui, tucked – if a four-story building can be tucked – next to an equally large Chinese restaurant, which seems to wear its size more naturally. Approaching Karaku, if you didn't know it was a Japanese restaurant, you'd be forgiven for thinking it's a government building with particularly welcoming and well-attired staff, or a cross-cultural exhibition hall, displaying lacquered antiques, Yao Ming-scaled kimonos, and minimalist screens in its blond wood lobby. The first floor, empty of nearly anything else (there may be a few seats back there), is larger than most restaurants. There's nothing in it but the aforementioned cultural relics, one or two cute waitresses ferrying your shoes to a hidden storage place, a mural of Mt. Fuji, and cream-colored carpet leading to the elevator.

It is officially the Shanghai outpost of Ippoh, an Osaka tempura institution with a branch in Tokyo and a Michelin star, whose five generations have been frying and battering and bowing, and bowing and battering and frying, for 160 years. Their emissary is Toyoichiro Seki. He is the chef, the general manager, and, I suspect, a happy exile. He has been running Karaku for four years, and cooking tempura for twenty-plus. His primary role these days seems to be making conversation and drinking sake with customers. A lot of sake. A tremendous amount of sake. He's not eager to work in Japan again.

Here's part of the lobby, leading to the elevator, and a private room on floor three:





Karaku is traditional. Cornerstone is traditional Japanese cooking, and seasonal, high-quality ingredients. Here, the first dish on last week's 690rmb Kiku menu: chawan mushi, a delicate, barely-set steamed egg custard, with gingko nuts, bamboo shoots, chicken, and a citrusy kick from the zest of yuzu.





The Kiku menu reads, in full:

Amuse
Hors d'oeuvre (selected)
Sashimi (three kinds of fish)
Osuimono (seasonal soup)
Tempura (shrimp, shrimp with shiso herb, whitefish, abalone, five seasonal vegetables) 12 pieces
Rice (Tendon or Tencha), Pickles, Akadashi soup
Dessert

The 490rmb Ume menu loses one kind of sashimi, the tempura abalone, and the seasonal soup; the 890rmb Ran menu trades one kind of sashimi and four pieces of tempura for 50 grams of grilled Japanese beef. By Sakura, the 1,200rmb menu, you're eating deep-fried gold ingots and washing it down with gathered dew from Mt. Fuji.

Tempura is Karaku's reason for being. The private room is centered on a single, sneeze-guardeded burner. There is a prep chef who appears in virginal white to fill the wok with fresh oil, as transparent and glassy as the South Pacific, disappears, returns to turn the oil on, and then steps aside as the blue-jacketed frying chef comes in for the main event. Like McDonald's, you are there to eat fried food. Unlike McDonald's, the fish is also excellent.

Here, a crescent of five small bites, Karaku's “hors d'oeuvre”:



From bottom right to top left, there's a circular piece of shrimp sushi; a spongy and mild two-tone fish cake, the base pure white, the top tinted with green pea puree; crisp julienne of raw cuttlefish, mixed with mentaiko, and garnished with a leaf – sanjiaoye – that cuts a peppery, lemony edge through the strong seafood flavors; a beautiful and supple aspic of abalone; and tile of braised beef, flavored with miso. All excellent.

Below, the sashimi course: fatty tuna; salmon wrapped around a fine julienne of cucumbers for a bit of crunch; and in the back, a firmer whitefish that the waitress identified as zuokou yu – sole, hirame– but a followup phone call identified as sea bream -- tai. Fresh wasabi, of course, and a translucent brown jelly, the result of soaking and grating a medicinal seed called pang da hai, or, inelegantly, “boat sterculia seed,” meant to aid in digestion and help alleviate sore throats. It tastes of nothing. The fish, however, sparkled.





After the fish, a ghostly-light dashi broth, with fresh bamboo shoots, a mild fish cake whose shape and pale color were meant to evoke a cherry blossom (it's the season now), caixin, and, again, the electric lemon buzz of yuzu rind.

Karaku's food, and its setting, are very traditional. The formula is simple: high-quality ingredients. It's what expensive tempura is founded on: adding a bit of fried crunch to otherwise pristine ingredients. The magical bit, the part that eludes essentially every other fried food and separates good frying from bad frying, is doing it without leaving the fingerprints of oil. How do you do that?

1. Fresh, flavorless oil. Safflower oil is flavorless on its own. Fresh oil hasn't had a chance to absorb any flavors from fried food, or start the slow chemical breakdown that eventually turns cooking oil thick, brown, and reeking of stale grease (see: youtiao).

2. A high temperature. Karaku is impressive for the chef's regulation of the wok. There's no thermometer, no protracted period of testing the oil. When the man in blue walks in, he waves his hand over the wok like Obi-wan Kenobi, mixes his tempura batter, tosses a few drops of batter in to confirm what he already knows by sight and experience – the oil is perfect – and starts.



Lightness is the measure of excellence in tempura batter, but watching the process looks like a mistake. Man-in-blue mixes cold water and flavor to an extremely lumpy batter, half-mixed and portending of failure, but it's key. Like making biscuits, the trick is handling the batter/dough as little as possible (gluten; Wikipedia has a surprisingly accurate tempura page that goes into more depth). If you can slip of the tempura “cloak” in one move, the batter has been overbeaten, and the crust will be too dense, too chewy, too good at trapping the water evaporating from the frying food… utter and complete and total failure.

Anyway, Karaku doesn't do that. It goes without saying that their tempura is perfect, feather-weight, eye-opening stuff. It never even hints at heaviness.

With the Kiku menu, it involves what's on the tray above: shrimp; shrimp wrapped in shiso; scallop; abalone; meaty bailing mushrooms; a small, butterflied whitefish whose name I forgot to ask; wonderfully tender planks of cuttlefish; tofu; purple taro; sweet pumpkin; gingko nuts; and a dumpling stuffed with red-bean paste that resembled tangyuan, but whose chewy, outer skin was made from shanyao, a mountain yam.

They come off the metal kitchen chopsticks of the chef, and onto the grate set at the top of the tray of tempura accompaniments, at a very fast rate. You've got, from left to right, lemon juice, snowflake crystals of sea salt, grated daikon radish to mix into the soy sauce/dashi dipping sauce, and a curious, undressed salad of lettuce and pickled cocktail onions. The waitress points out which one is for which – salt for the gingko nuts, lemon for the scallop, etc.





Here's Toyoichiro Seki, who wandered into our room towards the end of the evening, after the shrimp and before the tendon, a fritter of vegetables and shrimp over rice, with pickles and tiny dried shrimp, that rounds out the meal.





And then there's miso soup, a choice of ice cream, and Toyoichiro Seki racing down the stairs to meet you when you get out of the elevator.

Eat it.

Karaku, 2421 Xietu Lu, near Wanping Lu, 6438 3822. More details, and a map, here.

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