The Most Redneck Asian in New York

I have a joke I use on people, which is that I am the most redneck Asian in New York.

It is a joke, but only about the wording. I am not a redneck. I am a hillbilly, and those are different, and I have the childhood to prove it.

Both Sides

My mother, Machiko Shimada, is from Tokyo. My father, Robert Darner, is from St. James, Missouri. They met in California. So I am half Japanese and half Scottish German, and I have spent my whole life being read as one or the other depending on who is doing the reading.

My mother's parents were Momoko and Kiyoshi Shimada. My grandfather was one of the owners of Tenkuni, the tempura restaurant in Shinbashi, and they had a location inside Takashimaya as well.

Tenkuni goes back to 1885, when it opened in Ginza as a street stall. Tempura then was fast food, sold standing up, which I like knowing. The restaurant is still there.

He died before I could meet him. My grandmother came to live with us in California when I was around seven, so the Japanese side of my childhood arrived in person, in our house, in the mountains.

Where I Actually Grew Up

Lake County, California. Our land was five miles up a dirt road.

We did not have money. Most of what I had as a kid was hand-me-downs from my older sister, Hinda. What we did have was the property, so I spent my childhood in the woods doing what boys did then, climbing things and building forts in the dirt.

Five dogs and two cats. One of the cats died when I was still young. The other was Gin, which is silver in Japanese and not the drink, and he lived a long time and was more or less a third sibling.

My Name

Everyone calls me Kiyo. It is short for Kiyomizu.

My mother took the kiyo from her father's name, the character for pure. The second character in his name meant land. She decided that if his was pure land, mine should be pure water. That is Kiyomizu, the same as the temple in Kyoto.

I did not appreciate this at all as a child. I do now.

How I Started Cooking, Which Was an Accident

I had no interest in cooking. None.

My mother was a health nut and we were mostly vegan, other than whatever meat my father brought home. Then she became ill when I was in my early teens and often could not cook, so Hinda and I did.

That is where it started, and it started as curiosity about what changes what. I made a lot of fried rice and put increasingly questionable things in it to see what happened. Walnuts, for instance.

The one I still think about is the soup. I had read in a book that bay leaf was good in soup. I had not read closely enough to notice the part about it being dried, so I went outside and picked one fresh off a tree.

If you have never done this, understand that the bay growing wild in Northern California is not the mild little leaf that comes in a jar. It is a different plant and it is enormously stronger. I made possibly the worst soup in the history of the county.

Nobody teaches you that in a book. You have to ruin the soup.

The Actual Start

My first kitchen job was as a ranch hand. Helping in the kitchen was one of my duties, it was all prep, and it was no fun at all.

The year after that I got a dishwashing job at Oco Time in Ukiah, one county over. I was fourteen or fifteen, which was just old enough to work in California then.

I was fast and I worked hard, and the chef there, Renin Fujiwara, noticed and took me under his wing. He taught me to use a knife and started pulling me into prep during slow periods. I worked my way up and learned every station in that kitchen.

That is the whole thing. Somebody saw a kid working hard at the sink and decided to spend time on him. Everything after this happened because of that.

While I was there, Mendocino College was starting a culinary program, and I became an assistant to the woman running it.

Japan

When I was seventeen or eighteen, my mother and Renin came up with a plan between them: send me to Japan to learn the culture and the food from the side of the family I had only half met.

I went to intern at Fumotoya, a high-end soba restaurant, first at their Aoyama location and later at Otemachi, which if I remember right was right next to Tokyo Station.

It was supposed to be six months.

I stayed almost five years.

New York

I came back to the States in 2008 and decided on New York, which was a hard place to get hired that particular year.

The first job I got was at Torishin, in their original location. After that I got an offer from Matsugen, the soba restaurant Jean-Georges Vongerichten co-owned, and that opened a lot of doors. They had no kitchen positions, so they put me on the floor. That was the first time I had ever served, and I learned an enormous amount doing it.

When Matsugen closed I got moved to Jean-Georges at Columbus Circle, where I stayed a while and learned what fine dining service actually is when it is done properly.

After that, Brushstroke in Tribeca, David Bouley's project with the Tsuji culinary school, which is where I first got a taste of management. Then a few years of moving around and picking up whatever I could, before landing as manager of Aquavit. That one was a genuine pleasure, because Scandinavian food turns out to share more with Japanese food than anybody expects.

Then service director for DaDong, opening their Times Square restaurant.

Why I Left

That was the end of it for me. In 2018 I walked away from fine dining entirely.

I want to be precise, because this is easy to say badly. It was not that room, or those people, or that company. It was fine dining, and it was me, and the specific way those two things had stopped fitting together after a decade of it.

I took a break to reset. Then I joined Juraku, and in 2020 I became a partner, and that is a story of its own.

The Part That Connects

I did not plan any of this. There is no line from a boy building forts in the dirt to a bar on Ludlow Street.

But my grandfather cooked tempura in a city I would not see until I was almost twenty, at a restaurant that began as a stall on a Ginza street, and I ended up running a room where the point is that people gather and eat small things and stay a while.

I did not know that was what I was doing at the time. It is fairly obvious in hindsight.