Steam rolled off the copper-ringed wooden bowl and the sweet aroma of freshly cooked rice rose toward us. I leaned in for a taste. The grains were tender, pleasantly sticky, and subtly brightened with rice vinegar. Our host, Prairie Stuart-Wolff, showed us how to wet our hands with lightly vinegared water and gently shape the rice into small balls that would become temari sushi.
“It needs to keep its shape so you can pack it and transport it,” she said. “But if you squeeze too hard, the rice becomes this glutinous ball.”
After shaping, we draped a fresh kinome, or sansho-pepper leaf, over each pillow of rice and topped it with a slice of sea bream so translucent we could still see the herb beneath it. I sneaked a bite: earthy, herbal, delicate, sweet. It tasted like spring.
We were standing in the open, wood-paneled kitchen of Mirukashi Salon, a hyper-seasonal culinary retreat set in the hilly countryside of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands. It was March, and I had come with my partner, Laila, in hopes of catching the first buds of Japan’s famed cherry-blossom season.
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Prairie Stuart-Wolff/Courtesy of Mirukashi Salon; Rebekah Peppler
A steady drizzle had greeted us the day before when we stepped off the train in the nearby city of Fukuoka. Early springtime, Stuart-Wolff told us, is a turbulent season in Kyushu. “We get a lot of rain. We get a lot of wind. Spring is fighting to really bloom.”
Stuart-Wolff has a calm, assured air. Ask her a question (I asked many) and she has a ready and thorough answer. That hadn’t always been the case, she told me. When she first moved to Japan from Maine in 2007 with her now wife, Hanako Nakazato, who is a 14th-generation ceramist, she didn’t speak a word of Japanese. Since then, she has not only learned the language but has also become steeped in the island’s culinary traditions—its recipes, techniques, and knowledge—and now passes them along to visitors.
On our five-day retreat, Laila and I were joined by five other travelers. We foraged for watercress; cooked a hot pot with wild boar, seaweed, and enoki mushrooms; and went on field trips to meet artisans, small producers, and chefs at their ateliers and restaurants.
Prairie Stuart-Wolff/Courtesy of Mirukashi Salon
When we woke up at the Karatsu Seaside Hotel on the first morning, the rain had stopped and the skies were a bright blue. To take advantage, Stuart-Wolff decided that, instead of the planned pottery tour, we would take part in hanami, the Japanese custom of gathering under a cherry-blossom tree and admiring its ephemeral beauty. “They’re celebrated culturally because they are so fleeting,” she said. “We pack a picnic and go sit under the cherry blossoms, and just intentionally revel in that feeling.”
After our master class in making temari sushi, we packed the rice balls into tidy boxes and stashed them into baskets along with chilled bottles of sake, carafes of tea, jars of umeboshi (salted sour plums), and a clutch of ceramic cups. But it turned out the blossoms were not quite ready. After a half-hour driving around looking for cherry trees in bloom, we settled for a scenic spot under a tree with tiny pink buds overlooking Karatsu Bay. The picnic was delightful, despite the absence of full blooms, and I capped it off with a light nap under the sun.
Rain and wind returned the following day, so we gathered back in the kitchen for a lesson on dashi—the essential broth of Japanese cooking, which we made with kombu (a seaweed harvested in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island) and katsuobushi, or dried bonito flakes (produced in Kagoshima, in the south). The key to drawing out the umami and sweetness from the kombu without the bitterness, Stuart-Wolff explained, is to remove the seaweed just before the water reaches a boil. The katsuobushi is then added and steeped for a minute before being strained out.
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Prairie Stuart-Wolff/Courtesy of Mirukashi Salon
Over the next few days, we made the most of breaks in the rain to forage for slender stalks of tsukushi (horsetail), as well as tightly coiled warabi (bracken fern) that we used to make tempura. We spent one afternoon at Itoaguri, an old sake shop in the city of Itoshima, tasting different styles of namazake, or unpasteurized sake.
On another day we visited Monohanako, the pottery studio run by Nakazato, Stuart-Wolff’s wife, which was located just behind the salon. Her modern, minimalist pieces—such as a black bowl with a double lip and a beige cup with a crackled, rustlike patina—had already made frequent appearances at the salon. “Aesthetics play such a key role in the experience of eating in Japan,” Stuart-Wolff said as we sipped sparkling sake out of Nakazato’s white-glazed goblets. Just as the choice of ingredients shifts with every season, so too does the choice of vessel. “I love how they’re in concert with each other.”
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Prairie Stuart-Wolff/Courtesy of Mirukashi Salon
On our final day, we had another break in the rain, so we walked a few minutes to a terraced plot of land with chestnut trees where the salon’s new location was being built. I took note, and began dreaming of a reason to return. During my visit, the salon was set inside Nakazato’s family home, but the new space opened last October, just in time for the rice harvest season. It features an open kitchen with a big round table, and there are plans for a vegetable garden.
Walking back, with views of Karatsu Bay in the distance, I asked Stuart-Wolff if she had noticed any similarities among her guests. She paused to consider. “I’m really surprised by the number of people on their first trip to Japan,” she said. “I thought it would be people who were returning and looking for new experiences. But what I’ve realized is that we can offer a context and a lens into the culture.”
I could attest to that, it being my first trip to Japan, too. While we went on to visit the ancient temples of Kyoto and the bright, busy streets of Tokyo, it was in Kyushu—and specifically, at the large round table in the salon’s kitchen—that I felt most connected to the deeply rooted culinary traditions of Japan.
Four nights at Mirukashi Salon from $3,550 per person, all-inclusive.
A version of this story first appeared in the May 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Spring Awakening.”
