donuts4dinner.com » cuisine – japanese
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.
Restaurant Review: Sakagura
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.
If anyone can read that label, please do and get back to me.
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.