The durational work of art will always have its day. Jeanne Dielman. Lonesome Dove. Ponderously weighty, they bring their own gravity. The dining universe is no exception. I have spent hours upon hours soldered to my chair at the benevolent mercy of the Great Man (often an actual man, though not exclusively) feeding me at Important Length. Day turns to night; night turns to nighter night. Some of the most astonishing meals of my privileged life have transpired this way. So have plenty at which my ass fell asleep and I longed to join it.
A multicourse tasting can be transcendent or it can, as I’ve written before, drown a chef’s talents in too-muchness. I left one recent two-and-a-half hour meal feeling more depleted than restored. It wasn’t just the time spent. These meals have become so voluptuously expensive — some of the city’s top tasting menus and omakases now command $450 or more a seat before any of the add-ons — that the pain is no longer incidental; it’s part of the essential flavor.
I’ve been heartened lately to see a small counterprogram movement rise: the ancillary à la carte. First, Hirohisa, a Michelin-starred kaiseki on Thompson Street, switched its focus from full meals to choose-your-own adventures, recasting itself as Soba Ulala, where the pace, length, and selection of the meal is yours to decide, with much the same spate of daily specials and same attention paid. Then there is Hiroki Odo, whose namesake Odo serves a traditionally extravagant multi-dish kaiseki that’s been praised as one of the city’s great tasting menus and who opened Odo East Village as a kind of fine-dining izakaya with a menu reminiscent of the nine-course original but with the spirit of a jazzy Tokyo bar.
The pressure’s off; the food isn’t. The space on East 5th Street, with coat pegs on the bare wall in place of bowing-and-scraping attendants whisking away every encumbrance, sets the tone. A friend who joined me recalled soaking the hangovers of youth here in bowls of the former Minca Ramen Factory’s Tokyo tsukemen. Now, with the moderately greater wisdom of age, we sipped shochu highballs, their carbonated sizzle sweetened with thin slices of kumquat, and welcomed complimentary tiny cups of rice porridge with seaweed, ginger, and a fried tangle of baby sardines.
The menu puts a strong emphasis on a highly seasonal, always-rotating selection of seafood. Hugo Yu.
The menu puts a strong emphasis on a highly seasonal, always-rotating selection of seafood. Hugo Yu.
The menu folds out like a map to follow, charting a path from sakizuke (starters, named for their cozy complementarity to sake) to mukozuke (sashimi) and wanmono (soups), through to yakimono (grilled dishes), agemono (fried), and takiawase (simmered), but the actual offerings are so dependent on the seasonally available fish that it’s more a category guide than anything else. For specifics, a small company of three or four servers descend to explain that tonight’s owan — a golden-brothed soup served in individual lidded bowls for slurping — comes with fried bream or fried amberjack or that tonight’s grilled fish is Boston mackerel with miso. There’s invariably uni, flown in from Hokkaido, and the season’s new asparagus if you’re lucky.
Almost all of the cooking is done by one silent, chinstrap-bearded chef (Odo’s deputy, Koji Toyoda) on a single creaky gas burner and a beautiful copper-topped charcoal grill. Ingredients can be humble, like shirauo — illustratively called icefish in English — small and scraggly and a happy pairing with a bottle of beer when dusted with bottarga in a deep-fried pile. That’s good enough for me. Dishes start at $9 (a few miso-charged dominoes of cream cheese or some dashi-marinated tomatoes), and most of the menu stays below $20 (I saw two dishes marked MP — “market price”). I never found that I missed the hifalutin, a rigor that can shade very quickly into mortis. There was A5 Wagyu steak to order for anyone who wanted it — grilled rare, the flame of the binchotan charcoal nurtured with a handheld reed fan — and hairy crab served with golden vinegar jelly and shiso flowers. But there was just as much to appreciate, without the pomp and circumstance, in a stewed bit of tongue, braised in miso and red wine. A bowl of rice with soft-set scrambled egg. Barely churned ice cream, closer to cold cream, delicately flavored with hojicha and studded with walnuts. Even with a lengthy order, drinks, tip, and a bit of the Wagyu, I still left one dinner for two at about half of what I would’ve spent at Odo’s full tasting uptown.
No doubt I’ll be back to the opera-length kaiseki when the drama of occasion calls for it. But not most nights: I found a brighter spark in this disarticulated version. At some point during my meals, the jazz soundtrack gave way to a Nina Simone song, the great medley from Hair that Simone made her own in the late ’60s, a thumb in the eye of the haves and a celebration of the free-to-be pleasures of the have-nots. “Ain’t got no money,” she rumbles. “Ain’t got no class.” Who needs it? Big finish: “I’ve got life! ”
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