Restaurants: Nakaji in New York City
Restaurants: Nakaji, New York City
One Version of Tokyo
By Tse Wei Lim
Nakaji
48 Bowery, New York City, in the Bowery Arcade
tel 646.478.8282, nakajinyc.com
dinner, Tuesday through Sunday, seatings at 5:30 and 8:30 (the attached bar also requires reservations)
omakase $225, excluding tax and tip
I was one of ten guests on that day, sitting in a hushed room with dark grey walls. Jazz was playing. In this version of Tokyo, jazz is always playing. The room was fitted around a massive L-shaped counter of white oak that dazzled beneath pin-spots. An ikebana arrangement leapt more than three feet above the counter. Fish gleamed in the case, as did silver-lacquered placemats on the counter.
Kunihide Nakajima arrived in New York on March 16, 1997. He was 23, dispatched by his master at Sushiden in Tokyo to do a three-month stint at its branch in New York. “When I arrived, I thought New York was the center of the universe,” he recalls, “the food, the art, the culture.” Three months turned into five years, a marriage, and a green card. He still wanders the streets on his days off, taking photos of the Chrysler Building and the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.
His father was happy for him to go. “My father said, for my generation, business would not be so good in Japan.” Nakajima’s parents ran a restaurant called Yakko Sushi in Tokyo, a few hundred yards from the Imperial Palace. It was a neighborhood sushi-ya, with eight seats, that Kunihide’s grandfather Harukichi started in 1946. He had started out during the war selling roasted potatoes and potato soup from a street cart. When the government clamped down on street hawkers, he opened an izakaya and then Yakko Sushi. Not knowing how to make sushi, Harukichi searched out a sushi chef to teach him the craft. That he found a good one, Nakajima says, was destiny.
The noren (door curtain) from Yakko Sushi hangs on the wall at Nakaji, along with an enormous wooden menu, more than a meter across, that Harukichi carved himself. That menu followed Nakajima across the Pacific and up and down the length of Manhattan. It most recently hung in a neighborhood restaurant in Harlem, where he served california rolls at the tables and Kumamoto abalone at the counter. That room was not as polished as Nakaji, the guests not as prone to opening magnums of Bordeaux with dinner. But the sushi was exactly the same.
Then, as now, he used akazu for his shari (rice), which turns it the color of bird’s eye maple. The sushidane, as now, mostly came from the Toyosu fish market in Tokyo. They were no less varied in species, in origin, in the textures that Nakajima would coax from them, in how eloquently they whispered of the seasons on the far side of the world. (He finds the effects of climate change very apparent in fish.) He has multigenerational relationships with some vendors, and a license that allows him to place direct bids at the famed auctions.
The toppings are often revelatory. I’ve found the shari is best on Saturday nights, when Nakajima is most relaxed. Desserts are deceptively simple, often just ice cream garnished with kinako (toasted soybean flour) and Okinawan black sugar syrup. In the fall and winter, the ice cream often surrounds a spectacular homemade candied chestnut. If I were to change one thing about the food, it would be to coax more opening courses from the kitchen — they’re at least as interesting as the sushi.
In recent years, an influx of elite itamae has turned New York into a coenobium of kappo counters, just the chef and eight or ten guests. “They think they have a better chance here,” Nakajima told me. “In Tokyo there’s too much competition, too many sushi restaurants, especially at the high end, and the economy is not as good.” Ambition and the promise of riches still draw immigrants to the city at the center of the universe. It can feel like New York’s restaurateurs are trying to import Tokyo by the slice, which is a very New York thing to do.
One of the great pleasures of dining with Nakajima is the sense that he doesn’t actually need the lustrous setting at Nakaji, with its wall of family heirlooms, bespoke woodwork, and leather seats. The delicacy of his dashimaki tamago; the conger eel that tastes like his father’s; his posture at the cutting board. These are family heirlooms, too, made more precious by frequent use. He’s produced the same food at each of his last four restaurants, and will continue to do so after New York moves on to whatever’s next. “What’s most special about my food,” he told me once, “is that I’m the third generation of my family to make it.” ●
From issue 109The post Restaurants: Nakaji in New York City appeared first on The Art of Eating Magazine.