I lowered my eyes from the Alpine visuals and back to my notes on the previous days’ eating and drinking. The pages, which were thick with arrows and exclamation points, seemed only to get more densely crosshatched as time went on, and for good reason. The dozen or so meals I’d had in Tokyo had been a marvel of consistent variation, ringing fluid changes of texture and flavor on those three little words that define the cuisine of this island nation at its heart: iso no aji, or “tastes like ocean spray.”

By agreement, the majority of places Bob and I had gone to so far were chosen to illustrate the point that the most creative cooking in Japan is no longer being done in A-list restaurants. Those places, which continue to serve up superb food, belong to the days when the country was still riding high atop the mighty economic surge that carried it from the ashes of World War II all the way to the forefront of the global market. They’re relics of the time when the Japanese, so expert at mimicry, sent their best young chefs to the high-end restaurants of France and Italy where their work ethic ensured them a rapid rise up the kitchen ladder, and upon their return, the creation of perfect interpretations of their previous employers’ cuisine.

It’s no accident that Tokyo has the highest number of Michelin-starred restaurants of any city in the world. But rather than sampling the wares of these warhorses, I’d arrived to try the second culinary wave, a quiet in-house revolution that is afoot all over the country. Driven by chefs mostly in their late 20s and early 30s, its inspiration was the collapse of that same economic surge in the early 1990s, followed by the now famous stagnation or “20 lost years,” as it’s referred to in the foreign press. As the country entered a period of soul-searching, these young chefs took the opportunity to throw off what Bob calls the “legacy exoskeleton” of manners and slavish obedience to groupthink and instead to begin advancing the cause of native ingredients, prepared with great care and what seems at times almost freakish originality.

Exhibit A: the plate of smoked salted cod roe sprinkled with red chile pepper flakes at a restaurant called N-1155 in the hip, hilly Tokyo neighborhood of Nakameguro. The smoking and salting produced a deliciously bespoke version of fish jerky, whose peppery marine tang married perfectly with a chilled glass of sauvignon blanc.