Iron Chef Morimoto Plays Ball

He may be best known as the most serious and stern of the Food Network's Iron Chefs, but Masaharu Morimoto has a playful streak that comes through in just about every dish he serves.

Morimoto has defied the notion of traditional Japan cuisine, crafting a culinary fusion of East and West in which tuna sashimi becomes the basis of a tuna "pizza" and red miso paste flavors a French-style dessert soufflé.

These days, the 53-year-old, Japanese-born Morimoto, who got his start as a celebrity chef on the Japanese version of Iron Chef before bowing on the Food Network's American version, continues to be a TV fixture. We caught him recently at the Food Network-sponsored South Beach Wine & Food Festival in Miami Beach.

His culinary empire includes Morimoto restaurants in Philadelphia and New York, plus a third eatery, called Wasabi, in Mumbai, India. He also has a line of custom-made knives (up to $5,000 apiece) and a line of specialty beers through Rogue Ales, a microbrewery in Newport, Ore.

But Morimoto has long resisted cashing in on his celebrity by writing a cookbook, perhaps because his meticulously crafted food isn't about the 30-minute meal, prepared on the cheap at home. It's more about the theatricality of the restaurant experience.

Which is what comes across in Morimoto: The New Art of Japanese Cooking ($40, DK Publishing), the chef's newly released, long-anticipated cookbook.

True to form, Morimoto doesn't offer dishes that are always easy for a home chef to master, but the coffee table-worthy book gives you a sense of his finely honed culinary skills -- just look at the pictures of him demonstrating the Japanese art of cutting a vegetable into paper-thin slices -- and his relentless imagination.