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Asafumi Yamashita runs his fingers delicately through a bushy green tomato vine, plucking handfuls of blueberry-sized fruit. The bright red micro-tomatoes, bursting with potent, sweet flavor, will soon be on their way from Yamashita's greenhouse in the French town of Chapet to legendary Paris restaurants Pierre Gagnaire and l'Astrance.
Yamashita is a celebrity gardener, one of a select group of small producers who supply some of the world's top chefs. A stark cluding a Japanese restaurant called Benkey. He became friends with Benkey's head chef, who suggested that he start growing Japanese vegetables that weren't available locally and supplying them to Japanese restaurants.
With an initial investment of only $500 to buy seeds from Japan, he planted his first crop in November 1996, including such vegetables as komatsuma, a kind of spinach, and hatsukadadikon, Japanese radishes. Within a year, he was supplying 12 Japanese restaurants around Paris.
But Yamashita soon set his sights on a new clientele. "I believed my vegetables were Michelin three-star quality," he says. "I was determined to sell them to cooks who would know how to prepare them and let their true flavors come alive."
Yamashita gained entrée to the elite world of haute cuisine four years ago through his friend Yuzo Uehara, a Japanese chef working in Paris. Uehara had trained Christian Le Squer, now the head chef at Ledoyen, one of only 10 Paris one and with his wife, Naomi, an
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