I Did Not Start Juraku. They Turned Me Down the First Time.

I am the face of Juraku and a founding partner, so I would like to tell you it was my idea from the start. It was not. I did not start this restaurant, and the first time I applied for a job here they turned me down.

Since people ask, here is the actual version.

Before

I was a chef first, then I moved to the front of the house, and I spent more than a decade in fine dining at some of the biggest names in the city. Multiple Michelin stars. At one point I was at a three star, back when only a handful of restaurants in the whole city held three.

I loved it. It was a genuine challenge and it put me in front of people on the biggest nights of their lives. Proposals, anniversaries, birthdays. My job was to make sure those went the way somebody had been imagining for months. That part never got old.

Then I left a post managing a two star and got picked up to help with a new high end buildout, a multimillion dollar opening. That is its own kind of challenge and it is exhausting in a way that is hard to explain to anyone who has not opened a restaurant. About a year after we opened, I was done. Burnt out. I left.

The Month of Nothing, and Then the Boredom

I was lucky enough to have a cushion, so I took a month and did absolutely nothing.

It turns out I am not good at that. I got bored fast. I still needed a break from the intensity, but I wanted to be working, and I needed money coming in. So I started applying to places I thought would be less stressful. Casual spots. Smaller restaurants. Anywhere I would not be carrying the weight of a fine dining room.

That did not go how I expected.

My resume was the problem. I was applying to positions with the wage written right there in the listing, wages on the low side, and I would still barely get a callback. Nobody believes a guy from the two star wants the job, or they assume he will leave in three months, or they just do not want to have that conversation. A large and well known restaurant group did want to talk, and we talked for months. Interview after interview while they tried to work out where I fit. It never turned into anything.

So I kept sending it out. Taverns. Steakhouses. Japanese fine dining. Izakayas. I got interviews out of most of it and none of it felt right.

The Starbucks on 17th and Lexington

Then a listing came up for an izakaya on the Lower East Side that was opening soon. I figured why not, and sent the resume.

They asked me to come in. The interview was at the Starbucks on the corner of 17th and Lexington.

I showed up dressed for an interview. The person who showed up was in sweats and looked like he was barely out of high school. Other than the venue and the outfit it was a completely normal interview. He said I would have an answer by Sunday.

Sunday came and went. By Tuesday I still had not heard anything, so I reached out.

I did not get it. They had gone with somebody who had mixology experience.

That was that, and I moved on.

The Call Back

Several days later my phone rang. Was I still interested. It would be part time, more of a consulting thing than a job.

I did not have much else going on, and it would give me something to do, so I said yes. That is how I ended up working with Mitchi Shinohara and Zhe Hu at Izakaya Juraku.

It was a change of pace and I liked it more than I expected. The people were down to earth in a way I had not worked around in years. Fine dining attracts a certain kind of intensity and I had been swimming in it for a decade. This was not that.

So I started taking on more. Then more again. Eventually I took over the bar program, which is worth a small laugh given they had turned me down for somebody with mixology experience a few weeks earlier. I started making small changes as we figured out what the neighborhood actually wanted, which turned out to be a longer education than any of us expected.

The part time short term consulting gig became full time. I became the general manager.

Then March 2020

We were about a year and a half in. We were finally starting to understand the business, the neighborhood and who our regulars were. We had never done a real PR push and the press was just beginning to notice us anyway.

Then COVID.

We did not have the capital to ride out the lockdowns, the restrictions, and the customers who simply moved away. To keep the doors open with no cash coming in, the owners and I agreed that something drastic had to happen. By then I was already the face of the place and most of the decisions were already mine. Rather than let it go under, I became a partner.

That is not a glamorous origin story. Nobody handed me a restaurant and nobody had a vision on a napkin. I had been here since the day we opened, the place already ran on choices I had made, and I liked the people I was making them with. So we dug in and got through it.

What we actually did to survive that stretch is a longer story and it deserves its own post.

Why I Stayed

I have worked in some of the best restaurants in this city. Rooms with three stars and waiting lists and the kind of pressure that makes people quit the industry.

Juraku feels like home, and that is not a line. We have guests who have been coming since the week we opened. We have guests who come in several times a week. When I say an izakaya lives or dies on hospitality rather than food, it is because I have watched it happen from behind this bar.

It is not just a restaurant. It is a community, and I did not build that on my own or on purpose. I got turned down for a part time job here and stayed for years.

I still get to make somebody's night. It just does not require three stars to do it.