His heart-shaped onigiri are archetypes, a rice clingy and preserved usually adequate that each punch has flavor. They wear bands of nori like beauty-pageant sashes or crisscrossed bandoleers. Most fillings are dark during a center: flaked salmon off a grill; duck pan-fried with doubanjiang and gochujang, for a lacquer of feverishness and crunch; umeboshi (preserved plum), a spice so heated that it obliterates any eminence among salty, green and sweet. One heart comes studded with bacon shards and wrinkly edamame, a duel of brine and earth.
Credit
An Rong Xu for The New York Times
Here, too, is onigirazu, a comparatively new creation in Japan, credited to a manga artist Ueyama Tochi and his sequence “Cooking Papa,” about a salaryman who is happiest in a kitchen. To Westerners, onigirazu is tangible as a sandwich, despite with layers of rice instead of bread and a extended sleeve of nori to reason it all together. Mr. Oda builds his from slabs of pig or chicken, smashed and fried, slaked with tonkatsu salsa as honeyed as grill and surrounded by lettuce and, improbably, cheese.
Curry — closer to Indian than Southeast Asian, though mellower and sweeter — is done with bricks of roux from Japan, to that Mr. Oda adds “a lot of onion,” he pronounced with a laugh. Onion is all we tasted. Better were corn croquettes, shipped solidified from Hokkaido, that is famous for a fatness and benevolence of a corn. They’re served a inexhaustible 3 to an order, vast pompous patties with tawny insides, underneath golden bristles of panko that pulp like crisped air.
The usually plate on a menu costing some-more than $5 is ramen, that during $8 is scarcely half a cost of a starter play during Ippudo in Manhattan. Mr. Oda’s tonkotsu gas is cloudy, with a creamline lushness from simmering pig bones, duck skeleton and fish heads for 8 hours (“at least”) with kombu and a conduct of garlic (“don’t skin it”), and leavening contours of onion, carrot and apple.
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(Some days Mr. Oda creates a lighter-bodied ramen with usually duck skeleton and shoyu; it’s value job forward to ask that is on a menu.)
Rounds of cha-shu — pig swell tied into a roll, boiled and afterwards braised in sake, soy and garlic — are cut spare and relax immediately into a soup; they bend from chopsticks like Dalí’s melted clocks. The spare noodles in a inlet aren’t homemade, though they have kink and spring. Accessories are elemental: scallion rings, half a hard-boiled egg, stalks of bok choy combined during a really finish so they still have crunch. Pickled bamboo shoots move funk, preserved ginger a honeyed barb.
This might not be a robust tonkotsu ramen, with a sniff of a barnyard, found during ramen shrines elsewhere in town. What it offers, like all here, is comfort but affectation. It’s a play we can penetrate into, that takes we in.
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