Soba Artistry and Shokupan Sandos in Greenpoint

About ten years ago, the concept of “Brooklyn” seemed to be trending in Tokyo. In 2013, a chef named Makoto Asamoto opened a (since shuttered) restaurant called Fort Greene, which joined the establishments Brooklyn Pancake House and Brooklyn Parlor (on the menu: roast chicken, Brooklyn Session I.P.A.). The coffee label Brooklyn Roasting Company has set up locations in Tokyo, and a neighborhood called Daikanyama, a destination for brunch and vintage clothing, is sometimes referred to as Little Brooklyn. In the past few years, Brooklyn’s northernmost neighborhood, Greenpoint—once defined largely by its Polish and Puerto Rican populations; more recently, a relatively sleepy hipster hamlet—has seen a feedback loop emerge, with a wave of new Japanese businesses.

In the expansive dining room at the restaurant Rule of Thirds, panelled in blond wood and rimmed by sage-green velvet banquettes, you can order a gloriously puffy hottokeki, or soufflé pancake, for brunch, or sake-steamed clams for dinner. ACRE, a restaurant and gift shop around the corner, offers bento boxes and housewares; the other day, I bought sachets filled with fragrant curls of hinoki, wood from a Japanese cypress, to make my closet smell like a spa, and a small tawashi, a scrubbing brush made from tightly wound palm fibres, as spiky as a hedgehog. Afterward, I wandered north to the tea shop Kettl, where I drank a fragrant cup of hojicha, roasted green tea, and ate an exceptional bar of matcha chocolate studded with crunchy toasted buckwheat, its sweet, intense grassiness cut through with a jolt of salt.

If Japanese Greenpoint has an epicenter, it’s 50 Norman, a chic warehouse-like space shared by a handful of upscale businesses. A few weeks ago, I had dinner at HOUSE, which serves a French-Japanese tasting menu, crafted by the chef Yuji Tani, at a counter concealed behind an opaque sliding screen tucked into the back of the room. Over plates of luscious, shoyu-marinated yellowtail with caviar and grilled maitake mushroom atop Japanese-pumpkin mousse, a host explained that the restaurant is meant to emulate Tani’s home—or your own, if you spend enough money at 50 Norman. For a course of Wagyu beef, a nearly purple marbled wedge grilled on a charcoal stove called a shichirin, I was presented with a selection of rustic knives with handles made from tree branches or antlers. Similar ones were for sale at Cibone, a design store on the other side of the screen.

The dressing that Tani used for a baby-romaine salad was made with dashi from Dashi Okume, a local outpost of a historic shop of the same name in Tokyo, where savory dried ingredients are packed into translucent pouches, to be steeped in hot water like tea bags. The Greenpoint shop’s rows of bins are packed neatly with choices of seaweed, mushrooms, and fish including mackerel, sardines, and the gloriously named blackthroat sea perch. Intimidated, on a recent visit, I opted for a pouch of premixed “premium” packets, filled with bonito, tuna, anchovies, flying fish, kelp, and shiitake, a combination that tastes richly of soil and sea.

When I asked Sanaë Lemoine, a French Japanese novelist and the co-author, with Rie McClenny, of a new cookbook called “Make It Japanese,” if she bought her dashi at Okume, she laughed. Every few weeks, she told me, she makes a “little pilgrimage” to Greenpoint, taking the G train from her apartment in Bed-Stuy, but she treats the shops at 50 Norman as “a sort of museum.” Okume’s dashi is too pricey to keep as a pantry staple; like so many Japanese home cooks she knows, Lemoine relies, instead, on Hondashi, an instant powder.

On a recent rainy Sunday, I met Lemoine and a mutual friend of ours for lunch somewhere more accessible. A place called Taku Sando had just opened on Greenpoint Avenue, offering sandwiches made on squishy white slices of house-made shokupan, or milk bread. Each was layered with katsu (breaded pork or chicken cutlets), pounded thin, or plump potato croquettes, plus finely shredded cabbage, pickles, and katsu sauce, then wrapped in crisp paper that was sealed with a cartoon-eyes sticker. Lemoine and our friend, a native of Paris, compared the neighborhood to that city’s Rue Sainte-Anne, a street lined with Japanese businesses. “You see a lot of cross-pollination” between Tokyo and Paris, Lemoine said. “The Japanese chefs in Paris are better than the French chefs,” our friend argued, citing buzzy restaurants such as Clown Bar and Abri. We left with loaves of bread in paper bags.

Some people have been tempted to anoint this area as Brooklyn’s Japantown or Little Tokyo, but it is not a community of necessity, forged by a dense congregation of immigrants. (The Japanese population of New York City has never been particularly large—in 2020, it was around thirty thousand—and the area sometimes called Manhattan’s Little Tokyo, in the East Village, is hardly a neighborhood of its own.) What has developed here is something more unusual: a vibrant, organic ecosystem of culturally specific businesses, unhindered by the Epcot feel of Eataly, José Andrés’s Mercado Little Spain, or Japan Village, a two-story mall in Industry City, Sunset Park’s imposing complex of co-working and commerce. But Japanese Greenpoint does indulge a certain fantasy: that the most quotidian objects and ingredients can be imbued with a sense of quality and craftsmanship which is often associated with Japan, where even the onigiri and egg-salad sandwiches from 7-Eleven are exquisite.

Japanese food has long held a lofty spot in the imagination of American consumers, but it’s also been adapted to suit American tastes. Takeshi Matsui, a Tokyo-based academic who recently spent a year and a half studying Japanese cuisine in the U.S., told me that many of the Japanese restaurants in midtown Manhattan opened, in the seventies and eighties, to serve executives of corporations like Sony and Toyota as they courted American clients. These days, he observed, New York iterations of Tokyo establishments, such as the ramen restaurant Ippudo, tend to be more upscale than their counterparts in Japan. The dashi at the original Okume, which began in a fish market, is much less expensive than it is in Brooklyn, and cannot be customized. A choice of ingredients strikes Matsui as a very American amenity: “I often say in my marketing class, If you visit a sandwich shop in the U.S., you have to make a decision in every detail. This is not common in Japan.”

If there is one Japanese restaurant in Greenpoint that best embodies understated luxury, it’s Uzuki, a recently opened temple to soba, also known as buckwheat, that humblest of crops. The chef, Shuichi Kotani, is a master of noodles, which he makes daily from one-hundred-per-cent-buckwheat flour. (Packaged versions are usually cut with wheat.) Firm, slippery, and ever so slightly grainy, they’re served warm—in a glistening hot dashi made with duck bones and topped with medallions of roast duck—or cold, in chilled dashi, layered with thin sheets of raw salmon, pearls of salmon roe, shiso leaves, and daikon radish. Every bowl is finished with a sprinkling of pale buckwheat kernels, simmered until glossy and chewy.

Such specificity might seem gimmicky outside Japan, where it’s common for food businesses to home in on a single dish or ingredient; at Uzuki, the narrow focus feels earned. A dish of soba crackers—coarse, crunchy squares, hollow in the middle, scattered generously with chili crisp and salt—inspired a minor battle of chopsticks with my date. Soba miso is mixed with toasted buckwheat kernels, shiso leaves, scallions, dashi, and bonito to form a pleasingly gelatinous, tangy, umami-rich substance that’s shaped into a triangular slab the exact size of the piece of pottery it’s served on, then broiled until it bubbles and chars. I drank a glass of soba beer, and for dessert I had a large globe of soba ice cream, at once decadent and down to earth. ♦