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Stories from behind the bar: cocktails, ramen, Japanese culture, and life on the Lower East Side.
SakeSep 6, 2026The Overflowing Sake Is Not Generosity. It Is Arithmetic.A glass in a wooden box, filled until it spills. Everyone explains it as abundance. It started as a way of proving you got the full measure you paid for.FoodSep 5, 2026In Japan the First Drink and the Last Dish Both Have NamesA Japanese night out opens with a fixed sentence and closes with a fixed course. Neither is a rule anybody wrote down, and one of them has a promotion committee.FoodSep 4, 2026October 10th Is Okonomiyaki Day Because 10-10 Is the Sound It MakesJu-ju is both the number ten twice and the noise a hot griddle makes. Japanese does this constantly, and most of the vocabulary lives on restaurant menus.FoodSep 3, 2026A Client Turned These Fries Down. Now They Are the Most Filmed Thing We Serve.Japanese seasoned fries already existed and none of them worked, because the seasoning ends up in the bottom of the basket. Fixing that took a grinder. Then the client I designed it for said no.CommunitySep 3, 2026Sixty-Two Dishes and Two Hundred and Twenty Drinks. Here Is How to Order.Our menu has more than three times as many drinks as dishes, which is not an accident. If the list looks like a lot, the fix is not to read harder, it is to order differently.CommunitySep 2, 2026The Girl Holding the Sign Is a Real PersonMomo-chan holds the chalkboard on our homepage. She is not a mascot we invented. She is a regular, a founding member of TEN TEN, and the reason I once turned up to collect someone with her face temporarily tattooed on my neck.CommunitySep 1, 2026Juraku Means Gather and Enjoy. That Was the Whole Idea.Where the name came from, why the Lower East Side, what the place was supposed to be, and why almost none of that survived the first few months.CommunityAug 31, 2026Karen Iwata Helped Us Run the Tanabata Festival. Now We Are Sponsoring Her Show.She wrote and directed a reading play about the earthquake she lived through at twelve. It has played Tokyo and two towns in Miyagi, and on 23 September it screens in New York for the first time.CommunityAug 30, 2026I Did Not Start Juraku. They Turned Me Down the First Time.A decade in Michelin dining, a burnout, a job interview at a Starbucks on 17th Street, and a rejection. How I ended up a partner in a small izakaya on Ludlow.CommunityAug 29, 2026We Never Planned to Be the One Piece BarIt started with a projector left over from a Super Bowl party, an argument among the staff about judo, and the problem of shows ending halfway through service.SakeAug 28, 2026Junmai, Ginjo, Daiginjo, Honjozo: What the Sake Grades Actually MeanThere is a ranking buried in the grades, and it is ranking smoothness. That is a real thing to rank and it is not the same as whether you will like the glass in front of you.
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