Two years out of college and with a degree from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, Victoria Riccardi left a boyfriend, a rent-controlled New York City apartment, and a plum job in advertising to move to Kyoto to study kaiseki, the exquisitely refined form of cooking that accompanies the formal Japanese tea...
In anticipation of his trip, I began to search for an elegant ryokan where we might stay, since I was still living with Tomiko and Yasu. The famous traditional Japanese inns, like Tawara-ya, host to such luminaries as Marlon Brando, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and the two-hundred-year...