Izakaya Mew
In a city of so many restaurants, why do we keep returning to the same ones?
I’m writing this with my laptop balanced on the corner of my circular dining table with the Mets game on. (If you’re curious, I’m writing this on Tuesday night. Can I get a “let’s go Mets”?) I bought a puzzle on Friday afternoon with the goal of finishing by the end of the weekend, mostly because I had to sacrifice my entire dining table for this endeavor. Viraj and I made good progress, but the puzzle is probably only halfway done. It turns out, 1,000 puzzle pieces is a lot of puzzle pieces. And now I have no dining table. But nevertheless, I persist.
A few weeks ago, I read a piece in Slate by Delia Cai about maintaining long distance friendships, and her advice about “never losing your shared bit” with your long distance friends really resonated with me. I won’t do her the injustice of poorly articulating her point—please just go read the piece!—but my takeaway, which extends to all of my friends, near and far, is that the secret to long friendships is maintaining ongoing conversations and running jokes that extend beyond those get-togethers that seem increasingly hard to schedule.
But for those friends who do happen to live locally, shared bits can be a physical location. In my case, it’s almost always a restaurant. My friend Talia and I just went to KazuNori for dinner tonight, which is where we often meet for a post-work meal. My mother and I always go to Din Tai Fung: we’ve now been to multiple locations in California and Taiwan, and I can’t wait for her to visit me in New York so we can go here too.
Obviously, I love trying new restaurants. But there’s something so comforting about returning to the same restaurant over and over again, especially with the same person. Much like a recurring inside joke making time shared with an old friend feel like no time has passed at all, returning to a familiar restaurant, with the same chairs, same menu, same background chatter, can make multiple meals feel like one very long one.
When Jessica (frequent OMB guest!) and I first became friends back in 2022, she introduced me to Izakaya Mew, an izakaya that serves a wide variety of Japanese dishes. (Why yes, it is another Hand Hospitality restaurant!) We were in the process of transitioning our work friendship to a real one—this was probably one of our first times hanging out outside of work—and it was the beginning of many, many meals out together. It’s been two years so the exact details escape me now, but we probably gossiped about people we worked with and had a grand ol’ time. What I do remember: their kimchi cream udon, and we celebrated Jessica’s birthday, since it was coming up.
I thought it was so good (the udon, but everything else as well) we went back again January of this year, where I once again can’t really remember what we ordered except for the kimchi cream udon. Call me a bad food critic—I was too focused on enjoying the company of my friend to really keep track of the plates and plates of food we were ordering.
And now it’s October 2024, almost two years since our friendship began, since I first ate at Izakaya Mew, since the first strand of kimchi-cream-covered udon touched my lips. On Monday night, I rode the train uptown to meet Jessica at Izakaya Mew, once again. If our first meal there signaled the beginning of something, this one, now, signaled an end—the end of us living in the same city. Not truly an end—Jessica, I hope we are friends until the end of time—but a pause in our shared bit of going to Izakaya Mew, of our never-ending meal there that has spanned two years so far.
We ordered the yellowtail carpaccio, which came on a bed of onions and covered in a green apple ponzu sauce. Lifting a slice of yellowtail revealed an overwhelming amount of onions, but it came together nicely drenched in ponzu. We had their pepper tuna salad: seared tuna, pine nuts, avocado, green salad with a sesame-flavored ponzu mayo dressing. The bowl was definitely too small for the generous heaping of salad, and I kept losing leaves to the table, but that ponzu mayo dressing was excellent.
We ate grilled shrimp on skewers with a garlic mayo sauce and fried shallots, then chased it with the double hamachi roll: yellowtail, avocado, masago mayo, cilantro and scallion inside and yellowtail (again), shishito and spicy ponzu on top. Viraj keeps talking about having a hard time finding Hawaiian-style sushi in New York, and I realized during this meal that Izakaya Mew has some excellent non-traditional rolls, including this hamachi one, which had just the right amount of kick with the spicy ponzu and shishito.
Finally, of course, we ordered the kimchi cream udon. It’s hard for me to describe just how good this dish is, because it is fundamentally what it sounds like: udon with a creamy, kimchi-y sauce. The chew of the noodle somehow pairs so perfectly with the thick cream, silky smooth all the way through. The dish isn’t spicy. Instead, the kimchi adds an acidic bite that contrasts so nicely with the heaviness of the cream sauce, making it easy to down bite after bite, which I can’t always do with an Italian cream sauce. The sprinkling of shrimp and mushrooms throughout are delightful as well: any way to eat more of that sauce. Seriously, my mouth is watering already…
And then just like that, another meal at Izakaya Mew finished. Jessica and I lingered at the table, and then lingered outside the subway station. Comfortable silence filled the air; neither of us wanted the evening to end. Well, lucky us: we’ll always have Izakaya Mew to return to and conversations that we can pick right back up. And if not Izakaya Mew, I’ll see you across a dining table very soon. Isn’t that our shared bit? Dining out?
Jessica: best of luck in LA. I love the city so dearly—the place where I first began to really understand who I am and who I want to become. Maybe you’ll come to agree that the West Coast is indeed the better coast.
Bite It!
Reservations are available up to seven days in advance on Resy. You can walk in, but I’ve never tried it. Proceed at your own risk!