On Maneki's menu, the blue fin sashimi is called "King of Tuna"—which, if I ever start my own punk band, is now in the running for its name. It's also something I'm going to start listing on my résumé: Line cook, sous, executive chef, food writer . . . King of Tuna.
Peter Mumford
Catch of the day? Obviously.
Peter Mumford
Maneki's current space served as storage during the Japanese internment of World War II.
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Under "Other Delights" are Japanese croquettes made of potato, pork, and onion, breaded in panko and fried. Twice running, I will remind myself to order the croquettes just to see what Japanese cooks in a Japanese kitchen with a hundred years of history behind it will do with a an old canon standard so European. Twice running, I'll completely forget, blindsided by the day's specials written out in careful longhand on sheets of paper taped to the walls, by the flux of the crowds that come and go in incomprehensible waves, crashing on a nearly empty floor that can go from quiet to riot within a minute.
I'll be bushwhacked by blue sprat brought from Kyushu, salt mackerel in ponzu sauce, fried whole fish, stiff and curled like parentheses, staring up at me with hot, white eyes still steaming; come in for hamachi don and end up sucker-punched by a delicate bowl of mozuku (kelp and sliced cucumber, one of the thousand little dishes at Maneki marinated in vinegar) or by spider rolls with the crab fried too hard and too long, sticking out of the top of my maki like a gnarled little monkey hand.
The variety at Maneki is stunning, overwhelming. The pure number of little dishes drowns me every time. The menu is ostensibly arranged by appetizers, entrées, traditional plates, noodles, sushi and sashimi, maki, and full dinners (including an anachronistic steak dinner, done teriyaki-style or rubbed with salt, served with tempura), but really it isn't. That is an imposed form, meaningless in execution, meant only to warp this cavalcade of snacks into some figure more understandable to those approaching it as a ritualized Western dinner with a certain beginning and recognizable end.
But this isn't dinner; this is something else entirely. And when, sitting at my small table near the bar full of drunken Japanese businessmen, pulling at the label of my Sapporo, I listen in on the conversation at the next table, where a small group of Asian 20-somethings are explaining to one of their recently arrived friends what coffee is and how people drink it, I realize that it isn't just dinner that's different here, but everything.
"Maneki? Oh, you've got to go to Maneki," one of my friends told me.
I'd been in the city two days, maybe three. I'd spent the previous day lost for more than an hour just trying to make my way home from the office, and still couldn't find a sandwich without help. Another friend—a trusted source—fairly drooled over memories so fresh they were still shining: ozen dinners and futomaki, yakitori and bowls of noodles slurped through clouds of tofu. "I've been there, I don't know...50 times?" she said. "I'd eat there every day if I could."
Maneki opened in 1904 at Sixth Avenue and Main Street, in a three-story building that looked like a Japanese castle. A hundred years ago, it was turning 500 customers a night on the floor, in the tatami rooms, and at the bar—serving the Japanese community centered in that neighborhood, catering their weddings and funerals and feeding them on Tuesday nights when no one felt like making the soba or shishamo themselves.
World War II and the internment of Japanese-Americans put a gap in Maneki's epic run. The building that had housed it for 40 years was ransacked and wrecked by assholes, the customers carted off to camps. The space where it operates now was used as storage for the belongings of many of those who were interned. When they came home, they all needed their stuff back. And when the space was finally emptied (somewhere around 1946), Maneki was reborn there, within walking distance of the ruined original, its walls covered with Japanese art, the paper screens of the tatami rooms erected, the bar built, the dozens of maneki niko good-luck cats finding homes on every bit of horizontal space.
The place fairly sweats history. For a restaurant in the United States, 100 years is beyond venerable. A century of service elevates a place into a tier where there simply is not much company. Maneki has had such a run, in fact, that in 2008 it was given a James Beard Award as one of America's Classics, putting it in a class with places like the Tadich Grill in San Francisco, the original Stroud's in Kansas City, Peter Luger Steakhouse in Brooklyn, and Doe's Eat Place in Greenville, Miss., which is one of my favorite restaurants on the planet (for weird reasons which have no bearing here). My first night at Maneki, I was actually seated facing that award—nicely framed and hung high on the wall near the entrance to the right-hand dining room, Beard's enormous Uncle Fester–looking head (embossed onto every medal) grinning down on all the happy people arrayed below.
