How to navigate Japanese cuisine, light a moody interior and graciously serve others
O-Ku's sushi, design and hospitality reinforce each other
On my fourth visit to O-Ku, a chic sushi spot in downtown Raleigh, I channeled my inner Karen and asked our waiter if he could bring over the manager. He introduced himself as Kimball, and I explained I was thoroughly impressed by the dining experience and wanted to ask him some questions for a piece. Speaking with him the following evening, I learned about the bridges between Japanese cuisine, interior design and hospitality.
Wearing a cardigan, tartan shirt and toffee loafers, I take a seat with Kimball at the corner table by the wall of windows. He has intense eyes, bronze skin, great hair. Pendant lights warm his right side, and a passing police car splashes blue and red on his left.
Born in Korea and adopted at six months old by an Italian-American family, Kimball showed a precocious flair for service. At three years old he learned how to make scrambled eggs. A year later while sleeping over at his grandparents’ house, he woke early one morning and was whisking away when his grandparents came reeling into the kitchen. He went on to complete a two-year culinary degree as he graduated high school and wound up working restaurants in Charleston, South Carolina.
I ask how O-Ku took shape and learn about one of the duties of well-heeled restaurateurs that sounded extremely fun and not like work at all.
“Research and development,” he says. “If we’re going to open an Italian place, we’ll fly to Los Angeles, New York and Miami, eat at all the hot restaurants, get some ideas. Interiors. Service. Menu items. Flavors. Presentation.” O-Ku, which he refers to not as a restaurant but a ‘concept’, “came from a meal at Nobu. 12 courses of food, not one single sushi roll.”
Kimball senses my confusion.
“‘Sushi’ means ‘with rice’”, he says, grabbing a pair of chopsticks. “If you put these chopsticks on some rice, technically that’s chopstick sushi. Sashimi is just slices of fish, just the protein. Nigiri is a single slice of sashimi on top of rice. So sushi is the nigiris and the sushi rolls.”
I’m digging the nuances. We take a pause and Kimball orders me everything on the menu.
“In American culture,” Kimball explains, “sushi means sushi rolls. So Nobu, 12 courses, no rolls, I was mind-blown. We had krudos, thin-sliced protein served with different accoutrements. Chawanmushi which is an egg custard. Carpaccios. Nigiris. Tartars. This is the area that really speaks to me in terms of real Japanese culture, the spirit of it.”
A waiter brings the first dish, o-toro tuna served sashimi-style on a slab of slate.
“Let me give you a one-on-one on tuna,” he says. “Every tuna, just like a cow, has different areas of the meat.”
I lean in, as if sat front row at an engaging lecture.
“The loin part is the maguro, the red tuna, the lean tuna. Then it starts to get fattier as it comes around to the stomach,” he says, running his fingers around his torso, “like bacon is the stomach of the pig, well, fish, the stomach is very fatty as well, and it’s what people want. So lean, medium-fatty and extra-fatty. The extra-fatty tuna, o-toro, is very prized. See how it’s not bright, ruby red? ‘Cause there’s a higher fat content.”
I’m hesitant to make a misstep during my lesson, so I ask Kimball how he navigates the boat of soy.
“Take it first without,” he says, “and the second with a kiss of soy.”
I follow the steps. Both melt in my mouth.
“A lot of people tend to mask the flavor of a sushi roll with a slob of ginger and wasabi,” he says, gesturing to the rolls waiting for me on the far end of the table, “then they dunk it in the soy, and really all you’re tasting is a soaked-up soy sauce sponge. But then you start eating this,” he says, pointing to the o-toro sashimi, “this is where the flavor is. How brave are you?”
“I’m pretty--”
“Do you like uni?”
“Do I like what?”
“Uni,” he repeats. “Sea urchin, you know, the spiky ball. You break that open, uni is the reproductive organ of the sea urchin. The gonads.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah,” he says. “It’s a delicacy.”
I pick up the oversized spoon and slide the glob down my throat.
“It’s pretty rich, now. Probably a little funk,” he says. “But creamy, richness, flavors of the ocean, as I like to say.”
“I’ve never tasted,” I say, clearing my throat, “anything like that.” To my American palette it tasted marginally better than a mouthful of seawater.
“Uni is an acquired taste,” he adds. “You are just scratching the surface right now of Japanese food that doesn’t include sushi rolls. I mean, the rolls pay the bills. Your average sushi-eating American gravitates to it. But once you start eating this, you crave it. It’s leaner, it’s cleaner, it’s amazing. You look at something like this,” he says, waving at the rolls, “and it can seem a little more…clunky.”
A waiter named Eljin brings my drink, a habanero-infused vodka with passion fruit. The glass is stemmed, the rim sugared, the cocktail “Sugar and Spice”. I sip the citrusy crystals and ask about the name, which took root at the original O-Ku in Charleston.
“One of the bartenders was brunette and a little more edgy,” he says, “and the other girl was blonde and a little more…sweet.” (I was thinking ‘plain’.) “‘Sugar and spice.’ Now it’s on every single menu.”
I tell Kimball about an article I had read in Vanity Fair by demigod restaurateur Keith McNally, owner of Balthazar, a brasserie frequented by blue-check New Yorkers. McNally got the idea for Balthazar while shopping for curtains at a flea market in Paris, stumbling across a photo of an Edwardian bar. “Behind the bar were shelves stacked 20 feet high with a magnificent display of liquor bottles,” McNally wrote. “These bottles were flanked on either side by two towering statues of seminaked women in a classically Greek style. I was so impressed that I said to hell with the antique curtains and bought this battered photo instead.”
McNally carried this photo with him for three years, adamant he would build such a bar if and when he found the right space, which took the form of a beat-down tannery one block from SoHo. McNally’s co-designer “suggested the two six-foot statues be carved by a classically trained sculptor friend of his, Brandt Junceau, whose only question was a discomforting one: Did I know a woman with a voluptuous body and firm breasts like those in the photo who was willing to model for him?” McNally warily asked two waitresses at his nearby vodka bar if they would model topless for the sculptor. They enthusiastically agreed. “The faces, bodies, and breasts of the statues are a mix of the two waitresses. Which parts are from which woman only the classically trained sculptor knows.”
Kimball understands my drawn-out parallel between the two sets of waitresses.
“Multiple restaurants in America have ripped off Balthazar’s interior,” he says. “It’s the biggest form of flattery, but yeah, everything down to the menu font. We went to Miami and looked at hotels just for their recessed lighting,” he says, grabbing a plate and using his hands to demonstrate. “There’s a certain way where if you have lights running here, a mirror here, and a space, you only see this glow coming from behind. That’s how being in the restaurant industry sparked my interest in interior design.”
Now we’re really cooking. As a design dork, I find it thrilling to chat with other design dorks about dorky design details. Kimball senses my enthusiasm.
“Here, let me show you something,” he says, walking me over to the built-in booth. Kimball shows me how they hadn’t done the lighting right; they are missing a strip of wood that would get rid of the unsightly reflection (left) and create a more subtle glow. He shows me the look they were going for (right), which is only visible from certain angles.
At this point, Kimball and I are two fruity drinks deep and passionately discussing the minutiae of recessed lighting, and if you’re wondering if we gave each other a big smooch or exchanged numbers, we only did one of those things, alright. We go back to our table, holding hands, and Kimball explains how they harmonize the decor and the menu.
“Tile to wood to stone, lots of visual, textural appeasement,” he says, eyeing the bare branches back-lit against columns of charred wood. “That’s how we go about creating our flavors, a lot of times it’s texture, it needs crunch.” From below a tea light flicks shadows across a plate of usuzukuri.
“Salmon is naturally fatty and creamy,” he says, “and the richness comes out ‘cause we add a touch of truffle oil. On top is wasabi relish, which gives you that high, nasal, horseradish heat, and the black is black volcanic lava salt. So you get salinity, as well as crunch.”
I have a piece and it’s exactly as he painted it. Creamy, melt-in-mouth, high nasal heat, salty crunch. Our rapport reminds me of the Balthazar piece.
“Did I know a woman with a voluptuous body and firm breasts like those in the photo who was willing to model for him?”
“Over the years,” McNally wrote, “I’ve noticed one unvarying trait in my customers. If offered a free drink once every 20 visits, they love the restaurant. But if offered a free drink 19 visits in a row but not on their 20th visit, they’re pissed off and resent the restaurant. I’ve since realized this holds true outside of restaurants.”
On our third visit to O-Ku, Gio and I sat with two friends at a center table. We had barely waited five minutes to be greeted, but the manager that day felt compelled to apologize with a round of sake shots.
“We gift more than normal,” Kimball notes, “but I would say it’s more impactful. Service is a very technical part of the experience. Hospitality, to me, is how you as the guest feel about us giving you the service.”
Many years earlier as a child, he had an epiphany while dining at a nice restaurant. Kimball got a kick out of the waiter periodically refilling his water, so he chugged it over and over, unable to resist the waiter refilling it without his asking. “I realized,” he says, “what it felt like to be taken care of.”
As if on cue, a waiter out of earshot tops up my water. It was Eljin, the same waiter I had asked on my third visit what the calligraphy on the chopsticks meant. He didn’t know. Later he came back to our table and said, “I asked one of the chefs. He said, ‘Health, wealth, happiness, love, long life.’” I thanked him for finding out. He said he was happy to have learned something and that the question pleased the chef.
“You know,” Kimball says, “the Japanese have a phrase, ‘omotenashi’. It means to wholeheartedly serve your guest. There’s a saying in our industry,” Kimball adds, as I kiss another piece of usuzukuri with soy. “A happy chef makes more delicious food.”