Like a day in court or afternoon tea with the vicar, Hashimoto puts me on my best behaviour.

That was always the case in the restaurant’s first location, a tiny but opulently furnished room in a bleak Mississauga strip mall. There, the owner and chef, Masaki Hashimoto, introduced the province to kaiseki, the most refined and precious of Japan’s many distinct cuisines; as the years went by, his set dinners became ever more authentic and expensive. Tonight is the unpublicized debut of his new restaurant, hidden away in a wing of the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in the industrial hinterland behind Don Mills and Eglinton. It, too, is petite, seating a maximum of 10 customers, though only three of us are expected this evening—and it seems the other two are having difficulty finding the place. Rustling away in his dark blue kimono, the waiter has gone out into the night to wait for them in the parking lot, leaving me alone in an inner room with a bowl of green tea. I find myself sitting up straight, trying not to fidget, conscious of the serene formality around me. The sliding door has been left open, framing a dramatic display of white lilies on a polished black table spread with a runner of scarlet silk. Other colours are more muted—forest green, charcoal, maroon—while a spray of pin lights across the ceiling alludes to the night sky. And the music—a CD of an elderly Japanese woman chanting poetry to the plucked accompaniment of a three-string shamisem—has a strange but mesmerizing tonality. A kaiseki chef is responsible for every detail of his customers’ experience. Hashimoto has designed and built everything here by hand, including the lighting and the sound system.

The waiter returns and tells me that the other guests have given up in their search and cancelled their reservations; I will therefore be dining on my own. His name is Kei, and he’s Hashimoto’s 21-year-old son. Kei plans to become a kaiseki chef like his father, but he’s also studying English at McMaster and hopes to one day write the definitive book in English about the cuisine. “You must understand,” he explains, “the whole concept of kaiseki is only 500 years old—it’s still quite fluid and open to interpretation. With this new restaurant, my father is taking the next step, getting closer to the level of the great kaiseki restaurants in Kyoto.”

“There are other steps after this?”

Kei allows himself a smile. “Perhaps four or five… Many more years.”

But the new Hashimoto is already unique in North America, the only restaurant that reaches back through the centuries to kaiseki’s roots in the Japanese court, where the succession of tiny, esoteric dishes was created as a stomach-settling prelude to the cha-no-yu tea ceremony. Tonight’s dinner will end with Kei conducting the ritual for me in a private room designed for the purpose. Even in Japan, only a handful of places embrace this older cha-kaiseki tradition, and I am eager for such a rare experience. I also want to find out if it’s worth the price: at $300 a head before drinks, taxes and tip, this is the most expensive prix fixe menu Toronto has ever seen.

I have met Masaki Hashimoto several times over the years; he always comes out of the kitchen to bid a formal farewell to each departing guest. A slim and compact man of 54, soft-spoken and precise, he’s not given to unnecessary gestures. His English is pretty good, but whenever the conversation becomes too detailed, he defers to Kei, who is always ready to translate, interpret and explain—the same role he plays when serving customers. Father and son seem charmingly sympatico, but the reason goes deeper than your regular filial bond.