In 1965, the legendary Lyonnais chef Paul Bocuse, who had just earned his third Michelin star, travelled to Japan. In Osaka, he met with Shizuo Tsuji, a former crime reporter who, in his late twenties, decided to pursue his passion for classical French and Japanese cuisines by opening a cooking school. Tsuji introduced Bocuse to kaiseki, an elaborate, formal meal that is considered the pinnacle of Japanese cuisine. Kaiseki is not a specific dish or technique but a format, often involving a dozen or more tiny courses. It shares a history with the austere rituals of the Japanese tea ceremony, and incorporates aesthetic elements from Japanese art forms such as calligraphy and flower arranging. In its exactitude and restraint, Bocuse saw an approach that was in many ways the very opposite of decadent French haute cuisine. Returning to Lyon, he drew upon the principles of kaiseki as he pioneered what became known as nouvelle cuisine, a modern reimagining of French cooking that emphasized seasonality, the quality of ingredients, and a dramatic procession of plates composed with painterly flair.

The dots and squiggles of nouvelle cuisine have faded from fashion, but nearly every contemporary restaurant’s tasting menu owes its structure to Bocuse’s dégustation, which in turn owes its identity to Japanese kaiseki. In Japan, kaiseki restaurants are fairly common, but in America the tradition exists largely as an idea or an influence. “To be able to run your own kaiseki restaurant, you have to be trained in kaiseki restaurants for years and years,” Naoko Takei Moore, a cookbook author and Japanese food expert, told me. The chef Kyle Connaughton spent decades studying the intricacies of kaiseki cuisine before opening his Sonoma restaurant, SingleThread, but he still does not consider himself a kaiseki chef. Dave Beran, who took inspiration from kaiseki for his tasting-menu restaurant Dialogue, in Santa Monica, said, “If you asked me to name five kaiseki restaurants in the U.S., I couldn’t do it.”

The most prominent American kaiseki restaurant is n/naka, a small Los Angeles establishment owned and run by the forty-four-year-old Japanese-American chef Niki Nakayama. Japanese cuisine, at the high end, is virtually all made by men. When n/naka opened, it may have been the only kaiseki restaurant run by a woman in any country. Housed in a low gray building on a quiet corner in Palms, a neighborhood tucked between sleepy Culver City and the Santa Monica Freeway, it is open four nights a week, and seats twenty-six guests at a time.

Nakayama was born and raised in L.A., the youngest daughter of immigrant parents who owned a wholesale seafood distribution company. When she opened n/naka, in 2011, it was quickly recognized as a jewel in the city’s formidable Japanese-restaurant scene. In 2012, the Los Angeles Times critic Jonathan Gold wrote that “the sheer level of cooking in this modest bungalow eclipses what you find in grand dining rooms whose chefs appear in national magazines.” In 2015, Nakayama was featured on the first season of “Chef’s Table,” the Netflix anthology series created by David Gelb, the director of the hit documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.” Since then, Zagat has ranked it the No. 1 restaurant in Los Angeles. Chrissy Teigen, the supermodel and culinary personality, tweeted to her millions of followers that it was one of her favorite restaurants in the world.

Every Sunday morning, at 10 A.M. Pacific time, n/naka’s online-reservation system releases a week’s worth of tables for three months in the future; by 10:01 A.M., there are none left. Nakayama regularly receives gifts and letters from people pleading for seats. Aspiring diners have offered to bring in their own tables and chairs, or have shown up at the kitchen door and tried to palm a few hundred bucks to the general manager. One man offered Nakayama the temporary use of a luxury car.

N/naka has often been miscategorized as a sushi restaurant, the style of Japanese dining establishment most familiar to Americans. But sushi and kaiseki are in many ways opposites. Sushi is as much a culinary performance as it is a category of food. The itamae (head chef), usually wearing a kimono and a headband, prepares your maki and nigiri right in front of you. There’s theatre in slicing the fish, brushing on the sauces, shaping the rice between agile fingers; there’s banter with the customers, and macho jockeying with other chefs behind the bar. In a sushi tasting menu, or omakase, the chef is free to improvise the meal as he goes along, choosing whatever fish looks best. (The word “omakase” means “I trust you.”) Kaiseki, by contrast, has a predetermined flow, its interrelated courses incorporating dozens—if not hundreds—of ingredients and techniques to form a single narrative arc. Even the most exorbitant sushi omakase can be over with in forty-five minutes; a kaiseki meal takes hours to unfold. Junko Sakai, a Japanese writer, has likened a sushi chef’s approach to that of an essayist, and a kaiseki chef’s to that of a novelist.

And yet kaiseki does not broadcast its own cleverness. There is no futuristic culinary chemistry or flamboyant tableside showmanship. Its practitioners talk about it almost as a form of service, a subordination of the self. When I met Nakayama, she told me that, in kaiseki, “the ingredients are more important than you, the cooking is more important than you. Everything about the food is more important than you, and you have to respect that.” She added, “There’s a part of it that’s really prideful and ambitious, and yet it tries to hold itself back.”

Nakayama spent years immersing herself in the details of the art form. “She loves the obsessiveness,” Carole Iida, her wife and collaborator, said. Nakayama and Iida met in 2012, several months after n/naka opened, when Nakayama was working eighteen-hour days in the kitchen. Soon Iida, who is also a cook, closed her sushi restaurant to become the sous-chef at n/naka. Where Nakayama radiates creative energy, Iida is steady and direct, and she quickly assumed a role as the protector of Nakayama’s vision, taking over aspects of managing the restaurant that Nakayama had neglected. The two have a running joke that there is an n/naka B.C. and an n/naka A.C.—before and after Carole.

In the early days of n/naka, Nakayama made the menu as Japanese as possible. In a patch of earth outside the restaurant’s street-facing window, she tried to plant an ornamental Japanese garden for diners to gaze at during their three-hour meals. But the plants, and others in her yard at home, languished. Eventually, she swapped in local greenery, and gave over her home garden to vegetables that would flourish in the dry California heat: pink radishes, lettuce and chard, sweet tomatoes. Her food, she came to realize, could be “California kaiseki”—like her, a fusion of Japan and L.A.

At the heart of kaiseki is the notion of shun: the moment when a particular fruit, vegetable, or fish is at its absolute best. Some kaiseki chefs divide the year not into quarters but into seventy-two micro-seasons. The meal’s first course, sakizuke, is like a waymark on a map: You are here. In mid-January, when I ate at n/naka, with the Los Angeles Times restaurant critic Bill Addison, that meant a display of subtropical winter sweetness: diced Hokkaido scallop under a vivid orange gelée, next to an even brighter carrot purée, out of which ribbons of crisp-fried purple carrot streamed like the rays of the Southern California sun. Our server, an elegant Japanese woman in a sharp black blazer, told us to think of the second course, a multitude of two-bite dishes arranged on an oblong tray, as the table of contents for the rest of the meal: ankimo (monkfish liver) pâté; a skewer of lobster sashimi daubed with salty-tart preserved plum; a tiny porcelain cup of chawanmushi (savory custard); enoki-mushroom tempura, like a lacy fan of coral, with a cube of fresh persimmon. The course was a sensory strobe light, moving rapidly from rich to delicate, subtle to sharp.