He's now also a cookbook author, with Morimoto: The New Art of Japanese Cooking (DK Books).
Japanese purists may snort at Morimoto's interpretations, just as they sniff at his celebrity and his multiple endeavors. Besides Iron Chef, taped at the Food Network studios upstairs from the Manhattan Morimoto, the chef is never at rest. He shuttles among his four restaurants on two continents - in Philadelphia, New York, Tokyo and Mumbai, India - trying, he says, to work the line when he is in town. He said he had no plans for more restaurants. But there's the food-festival circuit and now a book tour.
In person, Morimoto is quiet and reserved, perhaps in part because of his limited English. And much of his showmanship and cooking personality is saved for the cameras.
On a recent afternoon, between lunch and dinner, he agrees to demonstrate the making of daikon fettuccine. Though there's a small audience, he goes arty while cutting the vegetable: It was the equivalent of your uncle's peeling an apple in one long spiral of skin.
Morimoto makes the sauce in a snap - pouring tomatoes, chopped onion and garlic, sugar, salt and fresh basil into a bath of hot olive oil. Bada-bing.
Before and after the lesson, Morimoto is nothing if not a photogenic icon in and around his restaurant.
Indeed, the new cookbook, too, opens not with food but with a good look at the man himself - a solid, ponytailed former baseball player from Hiroshima, a guy of 52 with a diamond in his left ear. The photos have Morimoto demonstrating how to tie a kimono, the better to keep one's sleeves out of one's food. The Iron Chef preparing for battle.
Samurai night fever.
Why write a cookbook?
"A lot of people say, 'This is a lot of work.' In this book, I try to make it easy."
