Uni, Mochi, and a Mission

Quail egg and uni. Photo: Rafal Maslankiewicz

At Ikigai, opening in Fort Greene on July 23, dinner will begin at the back of the restaurant. A landscaped courtyard has been turned into a tea room, a sanctuary from the noise and traffic outside. “We really wanted to get people grounded,” says Ikigai’s owner, Dan Soha. “It’s hard coming off the streets, from the subway” to a tasting menu. So guests will first congregate here for about 30 minutes with a welcome drink and Japanese milk bread. The courtyard also serves as a form of insurance, making this half-hour introduction a kind of grace period before service at the 12-seat counter. As Soha says, “We can’t get New Yorkers to arrive on time.”

Soha has never run a restaurant before, but his first swing in the industry is big, if not in literal terms then in its ambition. The California transplant has spent the past two years remodeling a partially subterranean space on Lafayette Avenue that was previously home to a string of other restaurants. He replaced the ceiling with shou sugi ban wood sourced from Japan and charred in Oregon, hanging a custom-built Nelson lamp fixture inspired by the Japanese tree spirits kodama and adding a phone-charging shelf under the curved dining counter.

Dinner will be a tasting menu that runs between eight and ten courses and costs $165. The kitchen will be run by Rafal Maslankiewicz, who came to New York from Poland in 2014 and has spent a decade working in the kinds of restaurants that characters on The Bear revere: Masa, Eleven Madison Park, and, most recently, Wildflower Farms in the Hudson Valley. “Through most of my career, I’ve been using Japanese techniques and Japanese elements for cooking,” Maslankiewicz says. His take on kaiseki will include the fresh-baked milk-bread service at the beginning of the meal as well as dishes like cacio e pepe udon with Peruvian mint, quail-egg-in-a-hole surrounded by uni (pictured), and duck with sansho pepper and concentrated plum purée.

But at its core — underneath the luxury ingredients and serene setting — Ikigai will be a not-for-profit enterprise with any money left over after operating expenses going to Rescuing Leftover Cuisine, an organization that redistributes what would otherwise be food waste from businesses to food-insecure communities and individuals. “My parents moved here as immigrants, and looking back, I don’t think I had a full appreciation of what we had or what we didn’t have,” Soha says, “because our parents didn’t let us know that. Being able to feed people that couldn’t get food otherwise was just a really big deal for me.”

Of course, many New York restaurants are “not profitable,” though not by choice. How did Soha come up with a business plan he thinks will work? To start, he owns the space and is not looking to recoup the costs of renovation, explaining that this is a labor of love for him. A serial entrepreneur — he estimates he has run 14 businesses in the past, in areas including online marketing and sock design — Soha says he didn’t need to take on any investors or partners. “There aren’t any loans,” he says, and no landlord beside himself. “Typically, a restaurant’s lease is 20 percent of its costs — if you get rid of 20 percent of your costs, the ability to be profitable is a whole lot easier.”

Soha is also clear that in addition to running a well-meaning restaurant, he wants Ikigai to be a standout in a neighborhood that has recently seen high-caliber spots like Sailor, Strange Delight, and Sukh open. With a Japanese bent, Ikigai offers something different even as it pulls inspiration from places familiar to New Yorkers: One potential dessert will pair fresh raspberries with sugar and sour cream as Maslankiewicz’s grandmother would serve them. The chef says they will accompany an updated version of knedele, fruit-filled potato dumplings hybridized with mochi by incorporating rice flour and potato into a single dough. “I was just trying to picture how those two ingredients can meet in New York,” Soha says, before he realized the solution: “There has to be cheesecake inside.”