The most magical dining experience I’ve had in recent memory was during a 6 hour layover in Tokyo at Sumibi Yakiniku Nakahara.
Sitting at the counter with Nakahara-san was a masterclass in learning what mastery and craftsmanship looks like. I didn’t know that beef could be this good.
It started with a prelude of squid sashimi marinated in gochujang, paired with a refreshing bowl of maekgolli. Then followed the symphony of beef – tartare with soy and raw egg yolk, perfectly cut thin sirloin with house tare, his signature gyutan/beef tongue grilled and served as three different parts, ichibo/rump, harami/skirt, shimacho/intestine, and wagyu katsu sando.
Each bite was incredible, but what made it so special was everything surrounding the food. I felt a true sense of warmth from the moment we stepped into the restaurant. The scene was set by elegant yet convivial sights and sounds of staff moving around an open kitchen preparing plates of beef and heating binchotan charcoal. It was the opposite of the stuffy jackets-required fine dining rooms of New York, where eating feels more like a performance of status.
There’s something special about being able to watch a master chef prepare and serve food personally for you. It’s witnessing mastery, but unlike watching a superstar athlete or musician, it’s a full sensory experience – not just taste, but smell, texture, sound, and eye contact.
“Sirloin with tare, one bite”
It was an awe inducing one bite, the kind of “melt in your mouth” experience that everyone seems to travel to Japan for, with a perfect balance of soy and sweetness that complemented the fat marbled decadence. As Nakahara-san was grilling the next course of gyutan, I asked what he puts in the tare marinade.
He looked up briefly and said “STSS.”
I smiled and nodded instinctively as I do when I ask a chef a question that is only partially curiosity, and partially an attempt to demonstrate that I Am Not Like The Other Food Illiterate Diners.
This time the joke was on me. He broke character and laughed, “Super top secret sauce.”
I enjoyed the banter throughout the meal. Context gives food a narrative. It’s this context that makes food content from Anthony Bourdain, Chef’s Table, and Lucas Sin so compelling. Food can rarely be evaluated in a vacuum; the chef’s personal history, the story of each dish and its ingredients, and your dining companions are what makes a food experience whole.
Nakahara-san spoke native English with a distinctive Japanese-American accent, and I learned that he was born close to my own hometown in California before moving back to Japan at age 4. Halfway through the dinner, he brought out a tin with two sticks of binchotan and explained how this special Japanese charcoal made from oak burns smokeless at a lower temperature. After touching and feeling the charcoal, two servers handed us towels to clean our hands. I smiled at how perfectly orchestrated this mid-meal show and tell was.
I asked about why he served Korean dishes – the gochujang squid sashimi and maekgolli that we started with, banchan interspersed throughout the beef courses, and refreshing naengmyeon to end the meal.
“Yakiniku originally came from Korea. It’s like the Tex-Mex of Asian food.“
Nakahara-san shared that he’s working on opening a restaurant in Miami. I asked why Miami, and he said it’s where his business partner lives. I asked if he’s going to serve caviar addons and charge 3x the price, and he just laughed.
I later found a Bloomberg article about Nakahara Miami’s opening plans, and the first sentence is so on brand:
Consider the wagyu katsu sando the Porsche of sandwiches.
I am sure Nakahara Miami will be a successful business.
Growing up, I had an impression that steakhouses were where fancy people went out for dinner. Fancy cuts of beef and fancy bottles of wine painted an image of the capitalist American dream, the kind of place where business deals were made.
Eventually when I learned to be a competent enough home chef to prepare my own steak, I realized that steakhouses are usually a low grade scam - reselling commodity items at insane markup. But of course, it’s not really about the food, it’s about the place.
It’s the type of place where patrons earn cultural and social capital by pronouncing fancy things on the menu that serve as status tests for the sophisticated crowd who know better than to pronounce by sounding it out. Filet Mignon, Sous Vide, Cabernet Sauvignon
These kinds of establishments plague the downtown New York scene - the sceney club restaurant. (and the super-downtown new york scene, aka miami)
Perhaps the state of status dining is best encapsulated by the phenomena of secondary marketplaces where trendy restaurant reservations are sold for hundreds of dollars. Or it’s the popularity of the social food review app Beli among certain circles, which on one hand has a clever ELO based relative ranking system, and on the other hand offers a brilliant medium for you to show off where you’ve dined at (I too am guilty of this).
There’s a concept from American sociologist Erving Goffman called the “dramaturgical perspective”, which is a way to view everyday social interactions through a lens of performance and theater. In the theater of the Status Dining Scene, we are all actors reading scripts in an attempt to give off a certain impression.
A classic performance that plays out is when you order wine. Cue the script:
Waiter brings the bottle of Sancerre you confidently ordered
Waiter: ”Who would like to try?”
Waiter pours you a taste of the wine
You pick up the glass by the stem, give it just a swirl to pretend that you know what you’re doing, stick your nose in, and take a sip
Pause for a second and then smile.
”Yes, that’s great.”
A friend recently hosted a birthday party at a trendy wine bar in Williamsburg, and it was hilarious when the waiter brought out a bucket of orange wines: “we’re going to start with a few different orange wines, and yes they’re all natural and funky”.
My favorite restaurant theatre performance that went embarrassingly off-script for me was when I dined at Sushi Noz a couple years ago.
When the chef placed the first piece of sushi in front of me, I took a picture with my phone rotated 180 degrees so that the camera was on the bottom. The chef saw me do this and asked “do you eat a lot of omakase?” I said no, but my friend is a regular here and I learned this technique from him when we came together. The 8 seat counter at Sushi Noz is an intimate space, and after this interaction the couple sitting next to me said that they’d follow what I did since it seemed like I knew what I was doing.
The waitstaff brought out everyone a small wet towel that’s meant for you to clean your fingers after picking up sushi. I didn’t realize this despite fooling everyone with my “experience”, and committed an omakase faux pas by immediately opening it and wiping my hands. One by one like clockwork, the rest of the counter patrons did the same – monkey see, monkey do.
Moments later the waitstaff awkwardly came around with replacement finger towels and explained that I had misled everyone. We all had a good laugh as I tried to hide my embarrassment.
There’s a joke that every New Yorker acts like they have “a guy” for everything (my halal guy). Towards the end of the dinner, Nakahara-san asked if we wanted to try onigiri made by “my onigiri guy”.
It was like the scene from the Big Short when Jared Vennett meets with Mark Baum and uses Jenga blocks to explain the fragility of mortgage bonds. Look at him. That’s my quant.
I couldn’t refuse the onigiri. Soon enough the “onigiri guy” came and set his canvas and tools out on the counter - a jar of mentaiko, a beautiful tin container with glistening sheets of seaweed, and a wooden hangiri bowl of fragrant rice. He carefully assembled the onigiri and then gracefully handed it to me.
“Beats 7/11 onigiri, right?”
Nakahara-san recounted a story:
“We once served a woman from Shanghai this onigiri. She took a bite and started crying… she said it reminded her of her mother. I asked if she had ever had onigiri before and she shook her head. But I guess there was something homestyle and comforting about it”
This reminded me of one of my favorite movies, Ratatouille. In the final scene, Ego takes a bite of Remy’s ratatouille and is transported back to his childhood in the countryside. Of all the fine dining and fine wine Ego has reviewed, it is the peasant dish that brings tears to his eyes as he is brought back to his mother’s cooking.
Food holds a powerful nostalgic ability. Food made with care and prepared personally is greater than the sum of its ingredients. Food is a vehicle for love and the human experience of taking care of others.
A common theme that some of my favorite food memories share is that I can observe the chef preparing and serving the food. From the chicken over rice smothered in white sauce from the Hooda Halal cart at Columbia to the bun cha eaten on stools in Hanoi to the grilled lamb kabab at Berenjak in London to the late night pad thai on Yaowarat Street in Bangkok to the falafel sandwiches of L’As du Fallafel – this is real food made with care. There is no kitchen door separating the dining room from the chefs in the kitchen; there are no waiters with complex niche ingredient descriptions; the theater of dining collapses to just one human preparing food for another.
I finally realized what made my dinner at Sumibi Yakiniku Nakahara so special to me personally. The sublime grilled beef brought me back to memories of my own childhood. Twice a week, my 13 year old self would come home from an exhausting soccer practice starving for what my mother called by only “Korean BBQ” - fusion Asian diaspora cooking at its best, with thinly sliced short ribs from Costco marinated in premade galbi marinade from 99 Ranch, broiled in an oven for 8 minutes. I have fond memories sitting at my family dinner table alone with sore legs, gorging myself with three or four strips of well charred short rib before starting on my nighttime homework session.
Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.
Anthony Bourdain, A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal
Spencer Yen
