Katsuya Fukushima - Chef of Minibar & Café Atlántico

At Minibar, making a ‘science’ of cooking

Back in zucchini season, when the rest of us were wondering what to do with the glut growing in our gardens, Katsuya Fukushima made zucchini caviar.

Behind the counter of the six-seat Minibar on the second level of Café Atlántico, the young executive chef transformed the humble squash beyond recognition. Its flesh became a cross between a mousse and a pâté, making a brushstroke of a base for the caviar. This turned out to be a teaspoonful of the individual seeds of the vegetable, plucked from it one by one with a tweezer.

Every one of the Minibar’s 30-some courses is tiny but perfect. For Liquid Cantaloupe Ravioli, Fukushima takes finely puréed cantaloupe and swirls a spoonful into a solution of agar, a vegetable gelatin that gives it a cellophane-thin skin. The wobbling bubble bursts in the mouth, filling it with the concentrated character of the fruit.

It’s probably the most challenging and complex cooking in the capital, as well as the best way to discover what Ferran Adrià, the Spanish inventor of this singular cuisine, is up to. Otherwise, you would have to go to the effort of joining the lottery for a rare seat at El Bulli, Adrià’s restaurant outside Barcelona, Spain.

Food of this style has been described as “molecular gastronomy.” Fukushima hates the description. “It’s kind of disrespectful to scientists. We are not scientists. We are cooks,” he said.

Fukushima doesn’t look like either. If he weren’t wearing chef’s whites, you’d take him for a deejay or snowboarder. He wears a ring in one ear and has his hair gelled up in a tousled mohawk.

But it would be a mistake to underestimate him and the responsibility he feels toward his craft. When José Andrés, not yet the owner of Penn Quarter’s Café Atlántico, left to launch Jaleo, he asked Fukushima to replace him as chef.

Fukushima turned him down. “I wasn’t ready, I didn’t think. I knew I could do it, but I wanted to learn more. It’s difficult to go back once you are a chef.” So he took off instead for experience in New York. An Army brat who grew up in Hawaii, Fukushima went to University of Maryland to major in math and art. He had thought he would try biochemistry and molecular biology, “until I realized how much I’d be studying.” He took odd jobs locally to make money. One day, a friend whose mother worked at the catering company Ridgewells needed extra hands for the U.S. Open.

“As soon as I set foot in the kitchen, I knew this was what I wanted to do.” He gave up school for Gaitherburg’s L’Academie de Cuisine. When he finished the course, he took not one but three jobs at once, working 80 hours a week on different shifts at Vidalia, Jaleo and the National Press Club. “I felt behind coming out of culinary school. I wished I had found it earlier.”

He was working in New York when Andrés called him to open a second Jaleo in Bethesda. Next, he encouraged Fukushima to spend six months with Adrià, for whom Andres had worked, at El Bulli and the laboratory where Adrià experiments half the year.

From Spain, he returned to New York until Andrés called him to help him take over Café Atlántico. Fukushima is just as happy cooking the restaurant’s Nuevo Latino dishes as he is crafting the deconstructions of the Minibar.

“I like to cook all kinds of food. It’s creative. Even if it’s something classical like a Caesar salad, I like to do a little twist. It’s already good, but I like to make it a little bit more fun to eat or fun to look at. ... I don’t expect a home cook to go to trouble of doing it like I do it.” The result is an “Organized” Caesar salad, and it comes with a grilled breast and confit leg of a Cornish hen, plated as separate elements.

Cooking paella is a favorite pastime. In fact, what Fukushima loves to eat is comfort food. “Meatloaf would be on the top-five list of favorite things. ... It reminds me of my mom cooking it.”

Comfort food is basic cooking, he said, but it shouldn’t be taken for granted. “Chefs are all trying to figure what is the best roast chicken. It’s very fundamental cooking. I love mashed potatoes. It’s one of the things that are so simple in terms of what is in it ... . But it’s really easy to screw up.”

At the moment, Fukushima, who is of Japanese descent, is playing around with foods evocative of his heritage, using the citrus fruit yuzu and different types of dashi, or Japanese soup stock. “I have to get to find a way to apply Japanese technique in a Latino restaurant,” he admitted with a chuckle. “But I want to pay tribute to my heritage. My plating is pretty simple, like Japanese plating.”

He’s looking forward to experimenting with bonito, a dried tuna. His mother went to Japan for Thanksgiving, and he asked her to bring some back for him. “It looks like petrified wood, and you slice it with a shaver.”

It will keep him entertained. He doesn’t have hobbies or an interest in sports. “It’s sad, but I like to go out to eat. Everywhere and everything. Even at a cheap Chinese place, you are always learning something.”

Café Atlántico and Minibar (202-393-0812; http://www.cafeatlantico.com) are located at 405 8th St. NW. Main courses cost $15 to $28, and Minibar’s tasting menu costs $96.

This article by Julia Watson first appeared in the Northwest, Dupont, Foggy Bottom and Georgetown Current Newspapers. Photo courtesy of Katsuya Fukushima.