The chef hunkers over a circular cutting board, pushing a few small, rosy slices of raw lamb into a pile. Then Wayne Nish begins to chop until he's left with a mound of lamb tartar, which he molds into the shape of a bonbon and arranges on a square white plate, alongside an identical mound of tuna tartar. Between them he dribbles a cascade of osetra caviar, tiny shimmering globules the color of wet seaweed. Aside from a delicate sprig of cilantro, nothing else is on the plate.

None of the ingredients is discernibly Japanese. And few customers would guess that the presentation derives from a kaiseki concept involving twin peaks hugging a waterfall. "A diner might not recognize the Japanese influence," says Nish, surveying his work in the kitchen of March, his exclusive Manhattan restaurant. "But the influence is significant."

The same could be said of the New York restaurant scene. Over the past decade, Japanese cuisine has seeped beyond the midtown sushi bars and into restaurants no diner would label Japanese, where the chefs are blond and the menus are in English. Kitchens are likely to begin a meal with salted edamame (soybean) in place of dinner rolls, serve fish raw rather than deep-fried and use soba instead of linguine. Sometimes the influence is as subtle as a drop of lemony ponzu whisked into a vinaigrette; other times it's as in-your-face as mashed potatoes creamed with wasabi, a dish so ubiquitous it's become a clichE. So many of the finest New York chefs work Japanese ingredients or techniques into their cooking that Ruth Reichl, editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine and former New York Times restaurant reviewer, says: "I would say there are none that don't."

The rest of the country is following suit. Half of all American adults have tried some form of Japanese food, according to the National Restaurant Association, and one in three has sampled sushi. The goddess of American homemakers, Martha Stewart, features miso and mirin in her recipes. Supermarkets from Philadelphia to Des Moines carry tofu, rice vinegar and ready-made California rolls, catering to increasingly health-conscious consumers. "You could say Japanese food has become an American food," says Hudson Riehly, a food industry expert.

Or perhaps American food has become Japanese. Undoubtedly the greatest effect Japanese food has had on American cuisine is to ease its reliance on fat as a taste booster. So it's ironic that the Japanese influence came to the U.S. by way of France, home of butter and foie gras. It all began around the '60s, when Japanese students at the great French cooking schools divulged their own trade secrets. Soon Parisian chefs had adopted such Japanese techniques as arranging food artfully in tiny portions. "The minimalism and simplicity, the sophistication of presentation appealed to chefs in three-star restaurants," says Jacques PEpin, French chef, cookbook author and TV host. "For that reason the Japanese influence was, I believe, far greater than that of Chinese cuisine."

Americans were slower to embrace Japanese cuisine—or Japanese anything. "They first had to overcome the prejudice left over from World War II," says Leslie Brenner, author of American Appetites. But when nouvelle cuisine swept American metropolises, it carried along its strong Japanese component. When raw fish first appeared on West Coast plates, "it grossed people out," says Brenner. "Americans didn't eat tuna except out of a can before the '80s. Japanese food changed our relationship with fish."

In New York the first sushi bar opened its doors in 1963. But it wasn't until the '90s that New Yorkers truly discovered the vast world of Japanese cuisine that lay beyond raw fish on a rice ball—and began to make it their own.

Transplanted Japanese chefs played an important role. Nobu Matsuhisa's Nobu restaurant introduced traditional Japanese recipes with a Peruvian twist, delighting the public and influencing chic kitchens of all types. "You see it in the emphasis on simplicity, purity and quality of product," says owner Drew Nieporent, a top New York restaurateur who also owns TriBeCa Grill, Montrachet and Heartbeat.

With Nobu, New Yorkers' palates and vocabularies expanded. A decade ago, when Tadashi Ono became the executive chef at the renowned La Caravelle, the owners omitted any mention in the menu of ingredients like yuzu, a tart citrus fruit, and shiso, a mint-like herb, because the exotic terms intimidated diners. Today, at Ono's own restaurant, Sono, waiters proudly tout the yuzu cosmopolitan and shiso margarita.

On a rare break from his kitchen, Ono greets customers in his restaurant's russet-colored dining area. He helped conceive the design, which with its chenille banquettes and straw-flecked walls looks like a cross between a Paris bistro and a Japanese teahouse. The chef even created the green- and brown-glazed plates, vases and cups in a pottery studio set up in the basement. The plates, too, have an East-West theme: a rough Japanese-influenced edge surrounds a perfect, Western-style circle.

If you had to label Sono, you'd call it French with a Japanese accent. Ono, a burly Tokyo native with slicked-back hair and a beard, trained at the four-star L'Orangerie in Los Angeles. "Japanese cuisine is a cuisine of ingredients; French cuisine is one of technique," he explains. "So I combine the two. I'll take pompano and marinate it in miso, which preserves and enhances the flavor. That's very Japanese. Then I'll turn to French technique in how I cook it." Ono points to his salmon dish: he cures the fish with salt and ginger, adds a pinch of green-tea powder as a counterpoint, then pan roasts it to a crispy finish.

Above all, though, Sono is New York. Look for proof in a menu celebrating the Jewish holiday of Passover: matzo balls in miso soup, sansho pepper-crusted lamb, even gefilte fish quenelles with wasabi and beet juice.

Ono concedes such extreme tampering with traditional recipes would be viewed as not quite kosher in Japan. But as Nish of March sees it, mixing and matching international cuisines is what Americans do best. Like many Americans, Nish himself is a mix. His ancestry happens to include Japanese (the name Nish is short for Nishimura, changed by his father to duck anti-Japanese sentiment). Growing up in Queens, Nish watched his father and his Maltese mother try to recreate dishes from home. "They always had to substitute ingredients," he recalls. "But that didn't mean the dish had less integrity. It's a practice as old as time; Marco Polo didn't sell spices from new countries with recipe books. It's simply evolution at work."

Darwin is alive and well in Nish's recipes. On a Thursday evening in the gleaming basement kitchen, a worker dots a carpaccio of lobster that rests on a shiso leaf with dollops of mentaiko, or spicy cod roe, and uni, or sea urchin. "The first time I made that, I thought I'd sell a couple to Japanese customers," Nish says. "Instead, it's become one of my most popular dishes." Another worker shaves thin circles of black truffle to decorate a wedge of hamachi, or yellowtail, sizzling in a pan of duck fat and bacon morsels.

Nish scoffs at traditionalists in the U.S. who object to meddling with the sacred cows of Japanese cuisine. "The Japanese are very good at borrowing things and making it their own—even in their cooking," he says. "Tempura came from the Portuguese. It's been argued that even sushi was a Korean development. So why shouldn't we borrow from the Japanese and make it ours?"

Chefs say one key reason to poach is the healthfulness of Japanese cuisine. Homing in on Americans' increasing attention to their bodies, restaurateur Nieporent tapped Michel Nischan to create a menu for his swanky Heartbeat restaurant in the W Hotel using no butter, cream or foie gras. "I was nervous," Nischan says. "Without those ingredients, people presume food won't taste good."

After some thought, he turned to Japanese recipes for inspiration. Heartbeat serves fluke sashimi, the transparent slices wrapped around cilantro and topped with sweet raw shrimp. Nischan sears his tuna tataki-style, drizzling the slices with vinaigrette and resting them on pieces of blood orange. A tea sommelier presents a lovely sencha, or Japanese green tea, to accompany the meal. "I've had a lot of skeptics give us big hugs," says Nischan, an affable father of five with a blond ponytail. "People say things like, I've got to eat sushi, I was at Peter Luger's [steak house] last night. Americans have realized Japanese food is healthful without sacrificing flavor."

Few foods other than Japanese have the advantage of appearing both diet-friendly and trendy. Hipness rather than fitness was on Jonathan Moore's mind when he conceived of Bond Street, a superchic restaurant downtown. "Nobu has great food, but it's not a happening ambiance," says the Israeli-born Moore, with a dismissive air. "There was no Japanese restaurant that was really downtown cool."

At Bond Street, rail-thin servers dressed in black glide around the three-story space, carrying lacquered trays of fanciful sushi combinations no Japanese diner would recognize. The sushi chefs, young Japanese expats, add to the din by shouting orders in unison. A Hispanic chef creates the hot entrEes—like soba risotto in smoked-trout butter under a mountain of shaved bonito flakes. "You see," says Moore proudly, "it's nothing like those places in midtown."

Trendiness aside, there is a limit to the adventurousness of American taste. Nish concedes that his customers stick to the old standbys when it comes to one category. "With traditional Japanese desserts, you get a tiny taste of something intensely sweet or you get the mild," he muses. "The philosophy is not to overwhelm your taste buds or your appetite once the meal is over. But Americans want their ice cream and chocolate cake."

Ono found this out the hard way when he opened his restaurant last year. His first dessert menu offered kuzukiri, glassine noodles made from the starch of kudzu leaves. It flopped. "Alas," he says, "they were not ready yet."

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