Juraku Means Gather and Enjoy. That Was the Whole Idea.

Juraku is written 聚楽. The first character means to gather or assemble. The second means enjoyment.

Gather and enjoy. That is the entire thought behind the name. Come to the izakaya, have a good time. Nobody was being clever.

Why the Lower East Side

The location was a practical decision before it was a romantic one.

We are close to Brooklyn, which makes us a natural stop for people who live over there and work in the city. The original concept followed straight from that. A place to come before you go out, and a place to stop on the way home. A pregame bar and a last-stop bar.

The logo came from Zhe, with help from Mitch's wife, who is an artist.

What It Was Supposed to Be

We probably ran the cheapest happy hour in the city. Low prices, and full sized dishes rather than the shrunken version that usually arrives with a discount.

Everything was small plates, all of it Mitch's design. The food was genuinely good and the room felt like an izakaya in the way that word is used in Japan. If you had walked in off a street in Tokyo you would have recognised what we were doing.

That was the plan, and it was a good plan.

What We Got Wrong

Within a few months it was obvious this was not what the neighborhood was looking for.

We were doing the stereotypical izakaya, and doing it faithfully. What I have learned since is that the stereotypical izakaya is a difficult concept in the United States. That is not a failure of nerve on anyone's part. The format quietly assumes things about how people order, how long they stay and what they expect a plate to be, and none of those assumptions carry over automatically.

So we changed, slowly. We stopped checking each idea against what an izakaya is supposed to serve and started having fun with what we actually wanted to make. The guests started coming in, and then they started coming back.

Whatever we are now is some combination of the food, the drinks and the feel of the room, and I could not give you the ratio.

The Unofficial Neighborhood Izakaya

That is how I think of us. The unofficial neighborhood izakaya, with a personal touch.

We have guests who have been coming since the week we opened. We have guests who come in several times a week. That is the part of running this place I find genuinely fulfilling, more than any single dish on the menu.

Which is the name doing its job, eight years later. Gather, and enjoy. We got the second half right by accident and the first half was always going to be the point.

A Coincidence We Had Nothing to Do With

One footnote, because people who read Japanese sometimes raise it.

The same two characters were the name of 聚楽第, Jurakudai, a palace Toyotomi Hideyoshi built in Kyoto in the 1580s. It was his seat of government, extravagant on purpose, and in 1588 he brought the Emperor to look at it. He handed it to his nephew Hidetsugu in 1591, forced him to kill himself in 1595, and then had the whole palace demolished to make the point.

It stood for a little under eight years.

We had nothing to do with any of that. We picked the word for what it means, not for who used it first.

There are also a hotel and a family restaurant in Japan trading under the same name, and we have no connection to those either. Which is rather the point. Two characters meaning gather and enjoy are a natural thing to put over a door where people are fed, so more than one person has arrived at them independently. We are one of them.

We did pass eight years this April, though, so a small izakaya on Ludlow Street has now been gathering people for longer than the golden version managed.

The palace was built to be looked at, which is a fragile thing to be. This place was built to be used.