Restaurant Review - Kajitsu in Murray Hill - NYTimes.com Ed Lefkowicz for The New York Times The chef's counter is at the back of the restaurant, with Ryota Ueshima at the helm. When I eat at Kajitsu, a restaurant that practices an animal-free cooking tradition called shojin ryori, I am never shocked to find that I don't miss meat or fish. When the Japanese have been working on an idea for hundreds of years, they tend to figure out a few things. To express wonder that Kajitsu's chef, Ryota Ueshima, can fashion a delicious multicourse meal out of nothing but plants and mushrooms is like being astonished when a French baker makes dessert from flour, butter, sugar and eggs. But each time I go to Kajitsu, which recently moved from the East Village to a tranquil and luminous new home in Murray Hill, I am still surprised by the variety of flavors that Mr. Ueshima coaxes out of meals that Westerners would call vegan. Before reaching across the chef's counter with porcini and morels cooked in steaming mushroom broth just until they have lost their raw crunch, he adds a ladleful of green sansho buds and blossoms to the bowl. They look like tiny grape clusters, taste a little lemony and make your mouth tingle in a way that intensifies as you eat. The sansho also seems to deepen and change the flavor of the mushrooms until they start to remind you of cured meat. On a blanket of Japanese maple leaves, next to a tall cup of spindly enoki mushrooms and a single boiled pearl onion with a red beak of miso, he places a little fried sandwich: two pieces of lotus root filled with house-made fermented tofu. Kajitsu is known for its fermented tofu, and if this strikes you as a sketchy claim to fame, then I urge you to eat some as soon as you can. It has something like the pungent, funky, very deep and long-lasting flavor of blue cheese, with a smoothness of its own. Even Mr. Ueshima's simpler dishes have unexpected depth. A chilled pea soup with a welcome sweetness was underlined by the slight savoriness of white miso. Chopped pine nuts, grated daikon and tender stems of wild parsley scattered over a soupy bowl of rice gave it a fresh, gentle flavor that was like the coming of spring. Shojin ryori was developed in Zen Buddhist monasteries after the religion arrived in Japan. The monks did not believe in taking life. They did believe in drinking tea. The frugal meal that preceded their tea ceremony grew into shojin ryori, which grew into the formal multicourse kaiseki tradition. That shojin ryori was vegetarian made it a devotional practice. That it was seasonal went without saying. At its original address, Kajitsu may have taken the monastic aesthetic to a fault. The plain walls and chilly stone floors of the dining room were so austere, they felt slightly punitive. The new place (above a shop selling expensive tea and even more expensive teapots) shimmers, although it has not quite gone Vegas. In the back is the chef's counter, carved from a single block of keyaki wood and sitting beneath a gently sloped cedar arch. The front dining room has a bay window and a ceiling that seems to hang in midair. Between the two, casually resting on one side just off the floor, is an 1,800-year-old ceramic pot. The service ware at Kajitsu is worth studying. Most pieces are handmade, like the carved wood trays and the hammered metal chopstick rests and sake pitchers. Vintage ceramics with small chips show signs of repair, and their age underlines transience of the seasons that is a major theme of shojin ryori. You could design a calendar simply by eating at Kajitsu every four weeks and taking pictures. Mr. Ueshima changes his menus on the first of the month, adding some plants that are at their peak and some that are on the rise. His dishes - four of them in a $55 tasting, eight in an $85 or $100 menu that ends with a bowl of matcha, green tea as thick and frothy as espresso - are drawn from the season, but they are also drawings of the season. In June, he used a glossy dark magnolia leaf as the lid for a soup of slippery wakame seaweed and sesame tofu fried to a satisfying crunch. Last month, he lay pointy lily blades across a bowl that held a kind of vegan Jell-O salad, a clear gelatin dome studded with slices of raw baby okra, cooked bell peppers and mountain yam. To garnish that pea soup, the first dish on his April menu, he had made tiny replicas of pink-streaked cherry blossoms out of thin sheets of wheat gluten and rice flour, then decorated the bowl with a cherry branch whose flowers were so exquisitely small and delicate that they made other cherry blossoms look like the centerpiece at the wedding of a mobster's daughter.