Rintaro
RINTARO, the debut cookbook from one of San Francisco’s most acclaimed restaurants, translates the experience of a Tokyo izakaya to the home kitchen.
Crowd-pleasing foods like curry rice, tonkatsu, and yakitori, eaten most often at lunch counters and in home kitchens, live alongside sashimi, fresh bamboo shoots, and other dishes that are usually considered part of a more elevated Japanese cooking tradition.
Through clear instruction, abundant photography, and utterly delicious recipes, RINTARO demystifies Japanese food for home cooks with over 70 recipes for rice, simmered dishes, homemade udon, and grilled foods.
RINTARO shows a cross section of Japanese food that isn’t usually shown in American cookbooks. The book showcases exciting but simple food that tastes both like Japan and California—not fusion food—but the food that you’d expect if the Bay Area were a region of Japan. With gorgeous photography and special design and production touches, this is a book that will live in the kitchen as well as on the coffee table.
Available where good books are sold.
Praise for Rintaro
“Chef-driven cookbooks can often miss the mark of translating restaurant dishes for the home cook. Not here. Sylvan Mishima Brackett’s first cookbook, Rintaro, honors and adapts Japanese traditions with a Californian state of mind, as he does at his restaurant in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco . . . His recipes, which possess remarkable clarity and detail, will appeal to amateur home cooks and seasoned restaurant chefs alike, and provide insights into Japanese cuisine the whole way.” - New York Times, “The Best Cookbooks of 2023”
“This is a dense yet still approachable dive into the world of Japanese cooking, with primers on dashi, breaking down whole fish for sashimi, coaxing maximum flavor from tofu and eggs, steaming the perfect donabe, and hand-forming fresh udon . . . Think of Rintaro as a crash course to turn your home into a Tokyo izakaya, seen through a Bay Area lens.” - LA Times, “The Best Cookbooks of 2023”
“The debut cookbook from Rintaro, one of the Bay Area’s best Japanese restaurants, is transportive, just like dining at the San Francisco favorite. Beautiful design and photographs shot by chef and author Sylvan Mishima Brackett’s sister take you into the heart of the Rintaro kitchen, which deftly combines Bay Area seasonality with Japanese cooking.” - San Francisco Chronicle, “The Best Cookbooks of 2023, From Easy Baking Guides to Deep Cuisine Dives”
“Sylvan Mishima Brackett’s passion for the izakaya culture of Tokyo extends far beyond his restaurant Rintaro in San Francisco—it infuses his entire approach to cooking with clarity, pleasure, and friendship in mind.” - Saveur, “The Best Cookbooks to Gift This Holiday Season”
“[Rintaro] really dives deep into the simplest of techniques and dishes – there’s so much confidence and boldness in that simplicity. There’s a homeyness to the recipes, but they are refined in the technique and ingredients.” - Chef Geoff Davis in The Guardian, “Chefs Share Their Favorite Cookbooks of 2023”
“A fascinating peek into Rintaro, the Japanese izakaya in the Mission District of San Francisco, and a series of culinary lessons in Japanese cooking.” - Dorie Greenspan, “Off the Shelf: My Not-Complete-At-All List of Good Books”
Sylvan Mishima Brackett is the chef/owner of Rintaro in San Francisco, which was named one of Bon Appétit’s Top 10 New Restaurants six months after opening in 2015. Sylvan was born in Kyoto and raised in Northern California. He is the former creative director at Chez Panisse, and trained at Soba Ro in Saitama, and at a Ryotei in Aoyama, Tokyo.
Jessica Battilana is a food writer, recipe developer, and author of Repertoire: All the Recipes You Need (Little Brown, 2018) and the co-author of over six cookbooks.
