When it comes to candy, the Japanese really know how to name their products for maximum American kitsch appeal:
Note that I found this on the same day I bought the bacon-flavored jellybeans from the SoHo Pearl River location, because the Japanese also know how I love to eat fattening foods but am too lazy to grill up some actual bacon.
The Crunky bars were like Kit Kats but less dense and less sweet, which is basically how all Japanese candy is in my experience. Which is why I’m never leaving the U.S. for it, despite the number of karaoke joints there.
Having reservations somehow makes me feel really cool–despite the fact that only old people plan their meals and that I’d actually be much cooler if I just walked into restaurants on a whim–and I love using OpenTable to book just about any meal I can. While rating my recent wd~50 dinner last week, I saw the OpenTable Diners’ Choice list for the top restaurants fit for foodies and was surprised that I’d never even heard of #1. So naturally, I promptly booked a table for two there for Sunday night.
Kajitsu is a cozy, sparse, underground East Village Japanese den dedicated to shojin cooking, which is the basis for all Japanese cuisine, especially haute cuisine. And it happens to be vegetarian, which is . . . fine. I was vegetarian for several years and think it’s a completely valid lifestyle choice, but I wasn’t sure even an eight-course tasting menu was worth $70.
The first course had me convinced. We didn’t know what any of this was (okay, maybe the carrots), and it was all so exciting. Even things I generally wouldn’t care for, like broccoli not covered in butter and/or melted cheese, seemed more delicious when placed delicately in a lacquered box next to all sorts of unknowns. There were so many highlights I can’t choose just one favourite, but the most delightful bit was probably the two black beans lying atop the chestnut paste on the plate in the back of the box. They were surprisingly sweet, skewered onto what looked like a cherry stem, and covered in a bit of gold leaf. It just goes to show how important plating is.
The real delight in a dish like this is that no matter how freakily eel-like something might have looked, I could just remind myself that it had to be vegetation of some sort, and vegetables don’t scare me. The little novelty ball of white, pink, and green in front was just gelatinous and starchy-tasting, and there was way too much bamboo for my taste, but even then, I appreciated the way they were presented.
Upon first taste, this was a relative disappointment to the first dish, because it was so mild. Upon second taste, I appreciated that we had to really stop and explore each sip of the soup in order to really get the flavor. The top piece of mochi was raw, and the bottom piece was cooked, and their juxtaposition was immense. I don’t really see a need for raw mochi to exist anymore, other than to remind me how much better it is grilled.
This was the closest to what I’d call comfort food, but it was much more delicious than, say, mashed potatoes. The skin on the cake flaked right off into crunchy layers that matched the crunch of the lotus seed and complimented the sweet pickledness of the myoga. The nori provided the base of the cake and a lot of ocean flavor.
I think I was a lot less impressed by the soba than my boyfriend was. I’ve had some really delicious hot soba at Soba Totto near Grand Central, and cold soba just doesn’t compare for me. The texture was wonderfully gritty and made the noodles seem very rustic, but even with the dipping broth and wasabi, they were missing something for me. Perhaps a HUGE HUNK OF BLOODY STEAK.
This was the silkiest, smoothest tofu ever. I still don’t quite understand what ankake is, but it was syrupy and slightly sweet. You can’t go wrong with anything tempura-battered, of course, but the crispy chrysanthemum leaves on top made this special.
Do not be won over so easily by the lily bulb! Yes, it’s beautiful, and yes, it’s unusual, but it doesn’t taste like anything! Fortunately, the rest of the rice did, especially after I soaked it with my miso soup. Which of course made it impossible to eat with chopsticks and thoroughly embarrassed my boyfriend. The real star, though, were the pickled vegetables, which were delicious to a surprising degree. I’m sure kelp would make me slightly squeamish in any other context, but it was so pickley and sweet here.
This was one of the better red bean desserts I’ve had. I sometimes don’t feel like topping a dry pancake with dry bean paste is very pleasing to the throat, but the warm outside skin of this was so moist. Still, as a dessert-lover, I would hardly call this a complete dish. A big, fat scoop of red bean ice cream was entirely necessary, and no amount of cute little red fork can convince me otherwise.
This was another dessert for people who don’t like sweets. I don’t want to say that the Japanese don’t understand the glory of insulin shock, but the lukewarm green tea was creamy and entirely unsweetened, the tiny rakugan domes tasted of plain sugar, and the hard candies didn’t explode in my mouth to reveal a gooey chocolate center or anything. Call me a glutton, but I’d rather have no dessert than two savory courses posing as dessert.
Of course, we also had to try the five-course sake tasting, and the drinks that came with dessert were better than either of the actual plates. My boyfriend got a plum sake, and I got a yuzu sake just to try something different, since I’d usually go for the plum without question. But the yuzu was incredibly sweet, and the plum reminded my boyfriend of a popular Persian soft drink, so we both ended up with what was perfect for each of us. We delighted ourselves by talking about how drunk we were going to be later, but sadly, there was just too much food for us to walk out swaying.
Aside from the dessert, which I’m half-kidding about, my one real criticism overall would be that the dishes in any given course didn’t necessarily seem to go together. None of the flavors ever clashed, exactly, but I now felt like, “Wow, this tofu wouldn’t be the same without those battered mushrooms.” Still, when I think about the dishes that really wowed–the osechi box, the grilled mochi, the lotus root cake–I’m blown away thinking about how simple yet flavorful they were. If a meat-filled tasting menu in this town is $125-$150, then $70 for all of this new-to-me deliciousness is more than worth it. The fact that I only missed meat in exactly one dish seems like a major accomplishment.
The New York magazine review of Otafuku says, “It’s very rare to find this stuff in New York. Consider yourself lucky.” Similarly, my boyfriend has been going on about this place for the entire nearly-three years I’ve known him. He went there on a date with a girl before my time and claims that while the date sucked, the food was life-changing. I don’t actually believe him about the date, but I was at least interested in the food.
Otafuku is not a restaurant. It’s a hallway divided in two by a counter, with men cooking on one side and customers ordering on the other. There’s enough room for four people to line up inside to place their orders, and after getting a receipt with a number on it, everyone goes to stand around outside. The pub next door has outdoor garden seating where people are reclining and relaxing, but Otafuku customers get nothing but a single, constantly-full two-seater bench out front. But no one’s complaining.
I don’t like the fruits of the sea, but Kamran tried to sell me on the fact that this is basically junk food, and I’ll admit that I bought it a little bit. There are three things on the menu here:
• Okonomiyaki: a pile of cabbage and batter molded into the shape of a pancake, fried with scallion and ginger, topped with squid, shrimp, pork, beef, or corn, and covered in okonomiyaki sauce, mayonnaise, and seaweed.
• Takoyaki: savory doughnut holes!, covered in okonomiyaki sauce and mayonnaise!, with a chunk of octopus, a squirt of cheese, or nothing inside, and bonito flakes (dried, fermented, and smoked tuna) on top.
• Yakisoba: fried noodles not worth talking about because there’s no batter involved.
I was especially down with the Japanese junk food when I was able to order the okonomiyaki with pork instead of squid, but the cashier told us they were too busy to make anything but the octopus takoyaki, so I let Kamran get that with the promise that I’d try one of the six dough balls. Twenty minutes later, we were standing outside with our friends and a crowd of other hungry customers when the cook yelled our number out the window and everyone else repeated it until we came forward.
We took our treats to the yard of St. Mark’s Church on 10th St. and dug in. The okonomiyaki tastes pretty much exactly how you expect it to–like fried cabbage, ginger, bacon, BBQ sauce, and mayo. Only it’s not like eating heavy American junk food that makes your pores oil up and your stomach bloat; with this stuff, you somehow feel as if you’ve just eaten something healthy. If you like the taste of cabbage, this thing will totally delight you. If you don’t, get it anyway and peel the pork off the top, because you can’t go wrong with bacon and BBQ sauce.
You don’t feel healthy with the takoyaki. It’s seriously a mouthful of soft, chewy doughnut. And not a fluffy doughnut, either, but an extremely dense one. Despite the fact that I’ve had takoyaki before with little squeamishness, I made Kamran eat the chunk of octopus from mine so I could have just the slightly-fishy shell. Back when I had takoyaki the first time, Kamran had been force-feeding me all sorts of fish to try to acclimate me, but he’s let his efforts slacken lately, and I’m back to being weirded out by seafood. I can’t imagine how good that little ball of fried dough would’ve been had it been filled with cheese.
This isn’t anywhere close to American comfort food, but it was a great experience, and I do consider myself lucky for having tried it, as New York magazine said I should. It was lots of interesting food at a great price, and not having a place to sit down with it was half the fun.
The sign outside of Sakagura is a perfect representation of the restaurant as a whole: to use one of my favorite clichés, it’s like putting pearls on a pig. Maybe I’m squeamish, but I had my doubts about the place when I discovered I had to walk through an office building, past a security guard, and downstairs to the basement through a cinderblock hallway to get to the dining area. The restaurant was nicely decorated, with lots of bamboo and spot lighting, but I couldn’t help feeling that the dark look was less trendy and more meant to hide the fact that we were sitting in a dank back room.
From the moment the bottle of sake arrived, though, it didn’t matter. My dinner date, Kamran, and I had settled on what was supposed to be some milky, nutty, dense sake that I’d hoped would sit on our stomachs like a glass of Guinness, but our server steered us away from it and instead suggested their seasonal sake. After seeing the giant spread for it in the sake menu, I figured she was just required to push it, but it turned out that light, sweet, and springy was totally befitting to the meal we were about to have.
I was glad our friend had taken us to a genuine sake joint a while back and taught us to drink from boxes, or this would’ve been completely befuddling. In case you’ve never had sake served this way, your server will overfill the box, letting some sake slosh into the bowl. Without looking like a cheapskate, you can totally tip the contents of the bowl back into the box and finish it.
Our first dish was a quad of tori tsukune or chicken meatballs ($6), which I’d really like to become a connoisseur of. I’ve had them from at least five different Asian joints at this point, and I love each more than the last. These were much more meaty than bready, just the way Kamran likes them. (I, on the other hand, am a carb glutton and want everything to taste entirely refined.) But dipped in salt, I could’ve made an entire meal of these things:
Our second dish was the entire reason we went to Sakagura in the first place: the jaga dango, described as “mashed potatoes coated in sweet donut batter fried crisp” ($6). This was real, live donuts 4 dinner:
And it was good, of course, because everything doughed and fried is good. The problem was that the dough overpowered the mashed potatoes. It ended up being one flavor, one color, and one texture:
And I’m not complaining! But I guess I just wanted some butter or some truffle oil thrown in. You know, to make it completely un-Japanese.
Our next dish was not for the faint of heart. It was listed on the menu as “buta kakuni, Sakagura’s special stewed diced pork” ($4.50), which had me expecting a measly spoonful of pork bits, but all of the reviews suggested it was the best thing on the menu. What arrived was a two-inch by two-inch by two-inch square of what resembled brown gelatin. But it was actually a thick layer of fat with a thin layer of pork underneath. Followed by another thick layer of fat and another thin layer of pork. For someone raised to cut every bit of gristle off a hunk of meat, this seemed devilish.
And it tasted it, too. The dab of spicy mustard on the side of the bowl, the sprinkling of microgreens on top, and the sweet liquid the pork was resting in formed one of the most mind-blowingly delicious dishes I’ve ever had. Some of that mind-blowingness may have come from the shock that it didn’t taste as disgusting as it looked, but I can’t argue with the fact that the fat literally melted in our mouths.
When my dumpling was finished, I tried to drink the remainder of the liquid, but it was just too intense for me. And I’m the kind of girl who likes chocolate bars made with 85% cacao, so intense is something I do well. It was just so porky yet so candied, so savory yet so sweet. I asked Kamran to finish my bowl off for me, which left him with this look of delight on his face:
Next, we had the gyu miso nikomi, which was “shredded beef back ribs stewed in miso topped with grated daikon radish” ($6.50), and it was another pleasant surprise. I like beef, and I like radish, but I had no idea what grated radish wetted with some miso broth could do for the texture of some tender beef. And the shisho leaf! I could have eaten that alone by the poundful.
The final savory dish was the tori karaage, “deep fried chunks of chicken marinade in sake and ginger infused soy sauce” ($7). Had it been the only plate we’d had, it would’ve been great, but after fatty pork and radishy beef, it just couldn’t compare. Although I certainly appreciated the lovely lemon sculpture:
After all of that food, we really didn’t have room for dessert, but there was black sesame crème brûlée with black sesame ice cream ($7)!
It was a sort of thin sesame cookie/biscuit/brittle over sesame ice cream over a very complex crème brûlée, but it was all oddly un-sweet. In a way that we liked. It wasn’t a dessert for everyone, certainly, but I doubt that any of their desserts are. Coffee gelatin, anyone?
Truly, it was a fantastic experience. We raved about it for hours and then days and can’t wait to go back.
