zen splendor; What do you get when you pair a Japanese master chef with an award-winning architect.(Morimoto)(Restaurant review)

Byline: Jeffrey Steingarten

Walking up Tenth Avenue, about to enter the sizzling new Manhattan restaurant Morimoto, we knew precisely what it would look like inside. That's because it was designed by one of Japan's greatest architects, Tadao Ando, and I had read what a top academic said of Ando when, in 1995, he won the Pritzker Architecture Prize (considered by many the Nobel Prize of architecture): "A key part of Ando's architectural philosophy is the creation of boundaries within which he can create introspective domains, encapsulating space where people can interrelate to light and shadow, wind and water, away from the surrounding urban chaos."

We pushed aside one of the orange-red noren, those rectangles of cloth that Japanese hang in doorways, which end two or three feet from the ground. I'm sure there's a reason for that. Two were decorated with Ando's calligraphy for Mori and Moto. And there they were, in all their unconventional beauty, 13,000 square feet of Morimoto the restaurant, full of introspective, encapsulating space, though without much shadow or wind. The water part was represented by an astounding wall, 22 feet long and 20 feet high, made up of 17,400 clear plastic bottles of spring water, arranged horizontally, their ends facing you, nine tons of them, suspended from a beam hidden in the ceiling, transmitting shifting patterns of light-delicious Ty Nant water from Wales, without gas, stored perhaps against the day when the urban chaos beyond the noren will engulf this city and demolish its justly renowned water supply.

A few years ago Tenth Avenue between Fifteenth and Sixteenth was a block in desuetude, flanked by the bygone headquarters of the National Biscuit Company, also known as Nabisco. Legend has it that many years ago, when America was young and carefree, within these industrial structures was born the culinary colossus we know as the Oreo. Today it is food central, home to the vast Chelsea Market, the Food Network (on which Morimoto the man has long been Iron Chef Japanese), the recently opened Del Posto (the swankest creation of the brilliant Mario Batali-and-Joe Bastianich partnership), and now Morimoto the restaurant.

My mind was distracted from Ando's masterly, playful design by fantasies of Morimoto's chawan mushi. I had eaten it but once, when Morimoto cooked it in an Iron Chef battle-Battle Duck, I believe. I was a judge, and I had judged it unbelievably scrumptious. Traditionally, chawan mushi is a silken, tender, savory warm custard topped by soup or sauce or a bit of meat; in Morimoto's chawan mushi, the custard was transformed by the addition of pureed foie gras and a lip-smacking duck broth. Will we find foie gras chawan mushi on the menu tonight? I wondered with fearful apprehension.

There, at the sushi bar, was Masaharu Morimoto-born in 1955, raised in Hiroshima, Japan. His blood type was and is B. In Japan, your blood type is considered a vital statistic like your height, weight, and coloring. It is routinely published in gossip and movie fan magazines, so I didn't even need to ask him. He was totally up front about it.

Morimoto was an athlete in high school, and Hiroshima's major-league baseball team, the Hiroshima Carps, named for the fish, was expected to draft him upon graduation until, at the last minute, he suffered a serious shoulder injury. Morimoto turned to his one alternate dream . . . making sushi. For eleven years he worked in various restaurants, got married along the way, and saved enough to buy two round-trip tickets to the U.S. with New York City as the couple's first stop-and, as it turned out, their last. He worked another seven years in assorted sushi places here, until he was hired by Barry Wine for the Sony Club, an expanse of posh dining rooms high up in the Sony Building, reserved for top executives, prestigious visitors, and, on rare occasions, completely inconsequential friends of Barry, which is how I first met ...