Department of Reservations: Kiko
A welcome whiff of the auteur blows in the city streets
Everything seems like it’s gotta be a blockbuster these day. It’s all Glicked and Barbenheimer, Intermezzo and Jenny Holzer and Solid Gold. Well capitalized, highly publicized, big swings from bold names. And, even if each endeavor does, in fact, bring the house down, it’s kind of a bummer that the weirdo cri de coeurs, hot heavy breathing from the wilderness, are often unheard.
Far from being immune to this tendency, restaurants — already a high risk and expensive proposition —are especially vulnerable. Lately it seems the restaurant scene has coagulated into large clots. Behind many of the most talked about openings are restaurant groups with flotillas of investors and/or a real estate developer to act as patron and (land)lord. For various economic reasons, restaurants have become amenities to the wealthy, vassal states to the gentry. (Christ, Stein, laying it on thick.) But when a restaurant opens that is clearly the work of a human being and their passion, it’s cause for celebration. Yippee for the small-scale, for all that the human hand can make and heart can feel. Most highest exalted yippee for all that man can cook and eat.
Kiko, which is Japanese for hope, is a restaurant of the human effort. (So too are Acru, Demo, Lola’s, Smithereens, but that’s for a later date.) Located in the no man’s land between Tribeca and the West Village, where the streets seem desolate no matter how crowded they are, the place is long-gestating project of Alex Chang and Lina Goujjane. Chang has been working in kitchens from California to Miami since he was a hobbledehoy; Lina, whose parents owned One if by Land, Two if by Sea, grew up in them. The menu here is autobiographical but not biologically essentialist. Born in Hong Kong to Chinese and Mexican parents, Chang grew up in California, frequently visiting his father, who lived in Japan. He’s worked around the world at Pujol and Animal Most recently he was the chef at my all-time favorite lunch spot, Il Buco Alimentari. Lina, a sommelier, perfected her craft at Majordomo and beyond.
Chang’s a master of infusing flavor upon flavor, folding ingredients in on themselves like a mise-en-abyme. Take for example one of the standout dishes, a duck nabe, which arrives bubbly and burnt yellow in a clay pot. It’s hot duck-on-duck action. The breast is sliced and fanned out like a duck of crimson playing cards (OMG, stop). The soup itself is a burnt yellow broth of spicy sesame and soy milk, dashi, tahini, hand torn noodles and ground up duck breast. It’s a mashup of Japanese curry, hot pot and tantanmen, deeply flavorful, perfect on a cold night, profoundly dumb lucky, very ducky.
X-on-X is a theme here, the clever work of a canny chef. The Dungeness crab features the titular crab meat and crab guts — the heralded tomalley — baked down, turned into a mayo along with crab fat and fermented chilis and returned to the now-empty shell along with sushi rice and nori. Sweet and spicy, it’s like a dynamite roll for those too ashamed to order one. (And relax, dynamite rolls are delicious. No shame.)
Again and again, Chang transmutes his own life experience into something shareable. It’s not all one thing. Neither Japanese; nor American; nor French; nor Italian. It is just Chang being Chang For my money, the Berkshire Pork Secreto is his greatest triumph. He has, as he tells me, been working on the dish for more than a decade. Here it reaches its highest form. The secreto — basically a pig’s delectable armpit — is marinated with fish sauce, soy sauce, garlic, ginger, sugar, coconut and condensed milk until, at the point it is grilled, becomes enrobed in a sweet coat of char, that opens to reveal succulent white flesh. One’s appetite is aroused, baby.
Kiko isn’t a big restaurant. It feels like a home. Not my home but a home. There’s a fireplace in back and a series of rooms leading into each other like a stylish pre-war six. The art is global — pieces hang from Papau New Guinea and Oaxaca — but the taste is specific. Everyone there could be your friend. Bonhomie fills the room like a soundtrack. It’s a person-to-person restaurant, one that sparks recognition, gives hope that there’s a voice on the other end of the line.
Kiko
307 Spring St.
New York, NY 10013