A certain pall fell over the West Village—generally New York City’s cheeriest neighborhood—when EN Japanese Brasserie announced that December 22 would be its last day of service. (Daniel Humm, the chef behind Eleven Madison Park, is taking over the space at a much higher rent.)
Designers like Norma Kamali, Alexander Wang, Jason Wu, Domenico Dolce, and Stefano Gabbana were among the fashionable figures who, over the past 20 years, made Reika Alexander’s restaurant a downtown mainstay. Even fashion’s Kaiser was a regular. “Every time Karl [Lagerfeld] was in New York he came,” says Alexander. “He told me, ‘You should open a restaurant in Paris!’”
In November, when Alexander threw a party to announce the restaurant’s closing, EN fans showed up in full force. The Schnabels were there, as well as Dave Chapelle and his wife, Elaine. So were Marina Abramović, Sofia Coppola, Chris Rock, Martha Stewart, and Maye Musk. “I’m so proud of my clientele,” says Alexander. “Japan is such a special country. Fashion designers, artists—anybody creative—has a thing with Japanese culture.”
“Erik Torstensson [co-founder of FRAME] and I lived around the corner when we first moved to New York and it was our local,” says Net-a-Porter founder Natalie Massenet. “Our favorite dish was not always on the menu and you had to request it: tuna on the bone. It was delicious but looked rather dramatic because of the tuna carcass.”
So what made EN Japanese Brasserie such a spot? Like many of the great fashion boîtes, it wasn’t trying to be one. “It was kind of a joke for me,” says Alexander. Just before opening En in 2004, she was a jazz pianist who had left her band in London. She was back in her native Japan when her brother, a restaurateur, drunkenly suggested she open her own place in New York City, jazz’s global capital. When she arrived, many of the restaurants in New York bored her. “All the authentic Japanese restaurants were located in Midtown, and they felt 1980s; super old school and very square. And all the hip ones, like Nobu or Bond Street, were not really Japanese food,” she says. Her concept: “Create something that’s more fun,” a “downtown spot that served the real deal Japanese cuisine.”
The menu included “freshly-made-scooped tofu,” which has been lauded as “flawless” (Michelin), “diaphanous” (Esquire), and “brimming with pasty charms” (Frank Bruni in the New York Times). Its izakaya-inspired fare hit the right marks between high-end and unpretentious: offering the very best of something you can get nowhere else—but also, no big deal. The proof of Alexander’s success was not just in the menu. Fashion spots come and go—we need not name them here—but few can last decades.
“My goal was to make something timeless,” says Alexander. It was in the restaurant’s bones. “I’ll always remember the drama and the performance of the building,” says Chris Benz, a downtown fashion fixture who has helmed J. Crew, Bill Blass, and his own line. “I remember loving the front bar and thinking, ‘If one were to imagine having cocktails in a James Bond film, this is certainly one of the aesthetics that it would have to be.’ It was always perfect lighting, perfect little lounge chairs, perfect floral arrangement.”
The details, the scale, the vibe, the adventure, the happy accident—it all added up to something not only something formidable, but also singular. This was obvious at EN’s goodbye party in November. The energy of the 450 attendees was almost enough to lift the gray that surrounded its closure. “I never, ever thought that a restaurant, a big restaurant like ours, could create so much love,” says Alexander. “I felt the oneness.”
