The Japanese Izakaya Experience

For the past couple of weeks, on my walk home from the subway, I’ve passed this place that looks sort of like a restaurant with a big orange “Riki” sign outside. The weird thing though is that there are no windows or visible door except down a small corridor. This door houses a little hanging “Open” sign. I’ve questioned what this was as it only seemed in operation after 6 and I only saw Japanese people go inside. Then one day, my sister tells me she really wants to try that new Japanese restaurant Riki. I told her I wasn’t sure it was actually a place to eat (I told her I thought it was a geisha house…apparently I really took the book Memoirs of a Geisha to heart) so we obviously consulted menu pages. On the site, they had another Riki listed at 45th between lex and 3rd so this has to be the original and the new one by my apt must had just opened up. The comments on menu pages all praised the establishment for being “Just like a Japanese Izakaya” and for those of us who don’t speak Japanese that apparently means some sort of traditional Japanese bar with drinks and snacks. This sounded extremely interesting and naturally made me want to try it.

Last night, my nut-allergic-friend and I decided to try the Izakaya as we were in the mood for sushi. Another piece of advice from the comments on menu pages was to try their hot food from the extensive menu. However, when we got to Riki, I felt completely overwhelmed and over stimulated. We walked in and a young woman greeted us and asked us if we would like to sit at the bar as the place had no tables left. Riki constantly had people walking in and almost every seat was taken mostly by Japanese people. There were also private rooms in the back for larger parties and another bar upstairs (which we didn’t get to see). At the sushi bar there were two TVs, each playing Japanese shows of random pop singers and children dancing. We were extremely entertained by this and the fact that one of the sushi chefs was wearing a black t-shirt that said, “Chef,” in case we didn’t know.

We sat at the bar and tried to look over the extremely large menu. The back of the menu had the standard sushi items which was a little more welcoming. I’m always down to try new things but I was still a littler nervous. Items that stuck out to me were cubes of beef in garlic broth and triangle rice balls of shrimp tempura. There were also a lot of cooked seafood, meats, and noodle dishes. Instead of doing these, however, I caved and ordered a dragon roll, a spicy tuna roll, and a miso ramen soup. This miso ramen soup was described as miso soup with Japanese noodles, but when it came out was really this extremely large bowl of soup with some sort of meat and noodles.

My nut-allergic-friend asked the waitress if there were sesame seeds on her rolls (a simple California and shrimp tempura roll). The server had no idea what she was talking about as she didn’t speak very good English. We had a trouble communicating for awhile until the sushi chef set a new roll on top of the counter and we could point out what sesame seeds were and reiterate that she was allergic. Unfortunately, we were unaware that the miso ramen soup must have had sesame oil or a type of nut in it because even regardless she had the throat-tightening feeling and was forced to take benadryl that she has so intelligently brought with her. She said she figured with them not speaking great English it would be inevitable.

The sushi was really good and the soup tasted sort of ‘traditional’ if that makes sense. I eyed other tables to see what they got. There was one table that had some sort of hot plate on it that was cooking a noodle dish while they ate it. It looked really good and I wondered what it was. The people next to us got some sort of spinach in sesame oil that also looked delic. I promised myself that I would come back and be more adventurous with the hot food. It’s places like this that you need a guide, a friend that knows the traditional cuisine to help you with your choices, any takers?