How Juraku Became OMRC's Winter Home Base

Paulsta was a regular here for years before any of this.

The story I always come back to is from 2020, right after New York let restaurants seat people indoors again.

The Flood

It was the middle of dinner service. Somebody came and told me a pipe had burst in the basement and it was flooding.

I went down to deal with it, and while I was down there I called Yoshi, who was working the floor, and told him to shut it down. We were finished for the day.

By the time I got the water stopped and came back upstairs, soaking wet, the dining room was empty except for two people.

Yoshi and Paulsta, sitting there, drinking a beer.

That is Paulsta. There are a lot more stories and most of them are his to tell.

The Ask

Eventually he mentioned he was part of a running club.

OMRC, Old Man Run Club. They wanted somewhere to have lunch after a run, and the catch was that we would have to open an hour early to do it.

We talked it through and did one.

That is where I met Ryo, one of the founders. The club was started in December 2018 by Ryo Yamamoto, Dao-Yi Chow and Eugene Tong, after a group email went round following that year's marathon asking whether anyone fancied a long run together. It is powered by Nike NYC and Oakley now, and the Saturday runs go anywhere from nine to twenty-two miles.

The name is a joke about feeling old. Everybody is welcome, every pace.

Opening early for a room full of runners was not something we had done before. It was fun, so we did it a few more times that year.

The Real Problem

Then Ryo came to me with something else.

The club had got too big to just meet anywhere. They needed a home base: somewhere to gather before the run, and somewhere people could safely leave their things while they were out on the road for two or three hours.

That second part is the one nobody thinks about. A hundred people cannot leave their bags on a park bench.

We talked about it and agreed to be their winter home base.

Since Then

We have been the official OMRC home base ever since, with weekly Saturday runs starting from Juraku through the cold months.

They leave from here, run, and come back. We open the kitchen early so there is a post-run beer and a bowl of ramen waiting.

The Dishes They Ordered Into Existence

A couple of things on our menu exist because these runners asked for them.

The loaded bowls, and the karaage loaded fries. Fries under Japanese fried chicken with cheese, spicy mayo and scallions, which is not a dish I would have built for a normal Tuesday and is exactly right for somebody who has just run eighteen miles in February.

They asked, we made it, and it stayed.

If You Run

Saturdays, cold season, from here. Details are on their Instagram.

You do not have to be fast and you do not have to be old.

More of the people we work with.