You’ve known Nikkei food far longer than you think

Some weeks ago, restaurant heavyweights from around the world gathered at the Lingotto Fiere exhibition centre in Turin, Italy, for the World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards ceremony. At the top of the list this year? Maido, in Lima, Peru, by Osakan-origin, Lima-born chef Mitsuharu “Micha” Tsumura. Maido serves a well-established fusion cuisine using Peruvian ingredients and Japanese technique on its 15-course tasting menu. Signature dishes include Nikkei ceviche, tiradito, and lomo saltado.  

Most of us living in Indian metros won’t need to look up ceviche. The thing is, even if you don’t know Nikkei as a cuisine, you have tried it somewhere. Until about a decade ago, Nikkei was more familiar as a well-regarded price-weighted stock index. But then came the first trickle of tiger’s milk onto Mumbai menus. In 2016, when I reviewed chef Atul Kochhar’s Latin American restaurant Lima, I had to explain that “tiger’s milk is the name given to ceviche’s runoff, made of marinade and fish juice, and considered by Peruvians to be both an aphrodisiac and a hangover cure”. Today, leche de tigre needs no introduction.   

Major cities across India now boast a growing list of Nikkei-forward restaurants or menus big on Peruvian-Japanese food. Koishii opened at The St. Regis, Mumbai, in 2022. In 2023 alone, we saw Pune’s Soy Como Soy, Goa’s Heliconia at the JW Marriott, and Los Cavos in Bandra, Mumbai, which has since expanded to Indiranagar in Bengaluru. Amaru, an eight-month-old Mumbai entry, offers a more affordable taste of Nikkei—at just ₹3,500 for two, compared to Koishii’s ₹10,000 price tag.  

But look deeper and you’ll realise that Nikkei food is not so new. Back in 2018, the Tham brothers announced that their flagship Asian restaurant, Koko, would offer an edit of Nikkei cuisine with chef Michael Paul from London’s Chotto Matte. In August 2021, in a review of (now recently reopened) Joshi House, which had food from... everywhere, I made note of a vegetarian ceviche (palm hearts, young coconut, jalapeños, and green apple salsa) that was simply stated on the menu, no provenance needed. 

Indeed, ceviche is the best-known Nikkei preparation globally and a gateway to the cuisine. In India, chefs have come up with many creative iterations of the seafood preparations—including but not limited to ceviche—to make them more palatable to vegetarians.

In October 2022, Spanish restaurant La Loca Maria launched with chef Manuel Olivera’s own rendition of a vegetarian ceviche made with palm hearts, grapefruit, miso tiger’s milk, cucumber, red onion, and spicy popcorn brittle, alongside a tiradito de hamachi with yellowfin hamachi, Nikkei tiger’s milk, raw mango, and basil.

Foo Asian Tapas offers Nikkei uramaki, gyoza, and taco too. In Delhi, Hikki, which opened two months ago, has a signature dish of pickled vegetables and brie sushi that, though well-liked by diners here, will likely be startling in Peru. In short, we are so familiar with Nikkei today, we have created our own version of it—a hybridised version of an already hybrid cuisine.

But what does Nikkei mean, really? 

We may know it as our introduction to Peruvian food, but according to Luiz Hara’s 2015 book Nikkei Cuisine, the term stems from nikkejin, or Japanese emigrants. So, people of Japanese origin living anywhere in the world are Nikkei. The largest group is in Brazil, and the second largest in Peru. In India, you’ll also see Hawaiian Nikkei food, most famously represented in poke bowls, which now anchor menus from Bandra to Bengaluru. But Peruvian Japanese is the variant most widely adopted in India.

In Peru, Japanese techniques merged with local produce—think raw fish with aji peppers, lime, and yucca—creating staples like tiradito, a sashimi-style dish in citrus leche de tigre. Quite like how Chindian was created in Tangra, Kolkata. (The story of how Japanese flavours have adapted across the world is a fascinating one, but we’ll leave that for another time.)

Of course, Indians love this cuisine without even knowing it well. How can we not? The chefs I spoke with unanimously agreed: Nikkei food, with precise technique, audacious big flavours, and playful combinations, is particularly suited to the Indian palate. In many ways, Nikkei’s sweet-sour-spicy-umami-creamy-crunchy-light-fresh profile is chatpata, just like our street food. (There, I said it.)  

When Nobu introduced Nikkei to global diners, it incidentally turned many Indian travellers into fans. On a visit to Dubai’s Peruvian restaurant Coya in 2017—where many of their signature dishes, like Chilean seabass, rice, lime, and ají amarillo, are Nikkei—one sweep around the room made it evident that Indians love the place.

So, why has our hankering for Nikkei food amplified of late? Perhaps it is because Japanese food is no longer a new and curious thing but a familiar one. Sushi is not only part of pan-Asian buffets, it is also on chef Sanjeev Kapoor’s Hindi YouTube videos and, believe it or not, on a street food stall in Nasik that sells California rolls made with as much ease as a raste ka sandwich. Ramen is not a restaurant novelty; it’s now on our supermarket shelves, and there’s even a dedicated online Japanese supermarket for fans of the cuisine. 

“With the growing popularity of Japanese, Korean, and Thai cuisines in India, diners are becoming more open to exploring other Asian fusion concepts,” says chef Paul Kinny, director of culinary at The St. Regis, Mumbai. “The familiar yet adventurous ingredients in Nikkei cuisine, such as miso and yuzu, make it a natural progression. This fusion is both accessible and exciting.”

At Koishii, this translates to dishes like Salmon on Fire with yuzu kabayaki (sweet soy) sauce and raspberry gastrique, or the Machu Pichu Negative 190Degrees with hamachi, avocado, sweet potato, habanero chilli, and N190 yellow chilli dressing.  These dishes are Nikkei in principle, but they are also found only in India. Nikkei food in India, like many other imported cuisines anywhere, is segueing into its own creole—sometimes with polarising iterations and edits.

“I remember working closely with the [Peruvian] chef, since he had hardly worked with vegetarian dishes, and it was a further challenge to curate some Jain options,” says Kinny about developing Koishii’s menu.  

One of the most popular dishes at Megumi in Mumbai, called Bhavnagri (stuffed Bhavnagri chilli robata basted with vegetarian tare), was also born out of this creative mishmash. Says chef Akshay Kale, corporate R&D chef of the Ramee Group, which owns the Santacruz restaurant, “Although the name sounds Indian, it has a distinct Japanese taste. It’s one of the best dishes on the menu and often comes as a surprise—especially since it’s vegetarian.” 

Sandy Singh, partner at Pune’s Japanese-Peruvian eatery Soy Como Soy, talks of the delicate art of curating Nikkei dishes to please Indian diners: “Dishes that successfully combined umami, tangy, and spicy elements, like our ceviche and tiradito, were well-received and made it to the final menu,” he shares.

For Shreyas Kadam, head chef at Bandra’s Amaru, Nikkei cuisine’s unique mix of complexity, heat, texture and freshness resulted in localised bestsellers like watermelon ceviche (watermelons are hugely popular in Japan, Peru and India), and causa sushi (made with mashed potatoes instead of rice).

At Goa’s Heliconia, Peruvian chef Arturo Castro Salazar brings a signature street-style ceviche carretillero (octopus, scallops, hamachi, chulpigunkan(battleship-shaped sushi wrapped with nori) with mushroom and tare, using local produce. “The use of locally sourced ingredients, such as coastal fish and tropical fruits, perfectly complements the techniques of Japanese cuisine,” he says of his menu. 

 Yazu, the pan-Asian restaurant with dining rooms in Mumbai and Goa, boasts of an annual Nikkei festival but it’s highly unlikely that chef Vadim Shin’s flavour combinations of seafood ceviche with coconut-infused yuzu and grenadine, and a tiradito (traditionally made with raw fish) of pear and beetroot are found anywhere else in the world.

While all this straying from Nikkei’s seafood base might have its detractors, perhaps in this with-arms-wide-open embrace of all things fruit and vegetables, Nikkei serving restaurants in India have found a way to pay homage to the cuisine’s central aspect—its all-embracing roots.