You Can Taste the Four Seasons of Japan at This All-inclusive Culinary Retreat in Kyushu

Steam rolled off the copper-ringed wood bowl and the candy aroma of freshly cooked rice rose towards us. I leaned in for a style. The grains had been tender, pleasantly sticky, and subtly brightened with rice vinegar. Our host, Prairie Stuart-Wolff, confirmed us the best way to moist our arms with frivolously vinegared water and gently form the rice into small balls that will grow to be temari sushi. 

“It must maintain its form so you’ll be able to pack it and transport it,” she stated. “However in the event you squeeze too onerous, the rice turns into this glutinous ball.” 

After shaping, we draped a recent kinome, or sansho-pepper leaf, over every pillow of rice and topped it with a slice of sea bream so translucent we might nonetheless see the herb beneath it. I sneaked a chunk: earthy, natural, delicate, candy. It tasted like spring.

We had been standing within the open, wood-paneled kitchen of Mirukashi Salon, a hyper-seasonal culinary retreat set within the hilly countryside of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s 4 fundamental islands. It was March, and I had include my accomplice, Laila, in hopes of catching the primary buds of Japan’s famed cherry-blossom season.

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A gentle drizzle had greeted us the day earlier than after we stepped off the prepare within the close by metropolis of Fukuoka. Early springtime, Stuart-Wolff instructed us, is a turbulent season in Kyushu. “We get loads of rain. We get loads of wind. Spring is combating to actually bloom.” 

Stuart-Wolff has a peaceful, assured air. Ask her a query (I requested many) and she or he has a prepared and thorough reply. That hadn’t all the time been the case, she instructed me. When she first moved to Japan from Maine in 2007 along with her now spouse, Hanako Nakazato, who’s a 14th-generation ceramist, she didn’t converse a phrase of Japanese. Since then, she has not solely realized the language however has additionally grow to be steeped within the island’s culinary traditions—its recipes, methods, and information—and now passes them alongside to guests.

On our five-day retreat, Laila and I had been joined by 5 different vacationers. We foraged for watercress; cooked a sizzling pot with wild boar, seaweed, and enoki mushrooms; and went on discipline journeys to fulfill artisans, small producers, and cooks at their ateliers and eating places. 

After we awoke on the Karatsu Seaside Resort on the primary morning, the rain had stopped and the skies had been a shiny blue. To take benefit, Stuart-Wolff determined that, as a substitute of the deliberate pottery tour, we might participate in hanami, the Japanese customized of gathering underneath a cherry-blossom tree and admiring its ephemeral magnificence. “They’re celebrated culturally as a result of they’re so fleeting,” she stated. “We pack a picnic and go sit underneath the cherry blossoms, and simply deliberately experience that feeling.”

After our grasp class in making temari sushi, we packed the rice balls into tidy containers and stashed them into baskets together with chilled bottles of sake, carafes of tea, jars of umeboshi (salted bitter plums), and a clutch of ceramic cups. But it surely turned out the blossoms weren’t fairly prepared. After a half-hour driving round searching for cherry bushes in bloom, we settled for a scenic spot underneath a tree with tiny pink buds overlooking Karatsu Bay. The picnic was pleasant, regardless of the absence of full blooms, and I capped it off with a lightweight nap underneath the solar. 

Rain and wind returned the next day, so we gathered again within the kitchen for a lesson on dashi—the important broth of Japanese cooking, which we made with kombu (a seaweed harvested in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island) and katsuobushi, or dried bonito flakes (produced in Kagoshima, within the south). The important thing to drawing out the umami and sweetness from the kombu with out the bitterness, Stuart-Wolff defined, is to take away the seaweed simply earlier than the water reaches a boil. The katsuobushi is then added and steeped for a minute earlier than being strained out.

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Over the subsequent few days, we made essentially the most of breaks within the rain to forage for slender stalks of tsukushi (horsetail), as properly as tightly coiled warabi (bracken fern) that we used to make tempura. We spent one afternoon at Itoaguri, an outdated sake store within the metropolis of Itoshima, tasting totally different types of namazake, or unpasteurized sake. 

On one other day we visited Monohanako, the pottery studio run by Nakazato, Stuart-Wolff’s spouse, which was positioned simply behind the salon. Her fashionable, minimalist items—akin to a black bowl with a double lip and a beige cup with a crackled, rustlike patina—had already made frequent appearances on the salon. “Aesthetics play such a key function within the expertise of consuming in Japan,” Stuart-Wolff stated as we sipped glowing sake out of Nakazato’s white-glazed goblets. Simply as the selection of components shifts with each season, so too does the selection of vessel. “I love how they’re in live performance with one another.”

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On our remaining day, we had one other break within the rain, so we walked a couple of minutes to a terraced plot of land with chestnut bushes the place the salon’s new location was being constructed. I took word, and commenced dreaming of a cause to return. Throughout my go to, the salon was set inside Nakazato’s household dwelling, however the brand new area opened final October, simply in time for the rice harvest season. It options an open kitchen with a giant spherical desk, and there are plans for a vegetable backyard. 

Strolling again, with views of Karatsu Bay within the distance, I requested Stuart-Wolff if she had seen any similarities amongst her company. She paused to contemplate. “I’m actually shocked by the variety of folks on their first journey to Japan,” she stated. “I thought it could be individuals who had been returning and searching for new experiences. However what I’ve realized is that we will provide a context and a lens into the tradition.”

I might attest to that, it being my first journey to Japan, too. Whereas we went on to go to the traditional temples of Kyoto and the brilliant, busy streets of Tokyo, it was in Kyushu—and particularly, on the giant spherical desk within the salon’s kitchen—that I felt most related to the deeply rooted culinary traditions of Japan. 

4 nights at Mirukashi Salon from $3,550 per particular person, all-inclusive.

A model of this story first appeared within the Could 2025 subject of Journey + Leisure underneath the headline “Spring Awakening.”