Why You Should Miss EN Japanese Brasserie—Even If You Never Ate There

A dispatch from the legendary New York restaurant’s farewell bash.

By Joshua David SteinPublished: Dec 10, 2024

Since it opened on a windswept corner in New York’s West Village, EN Japanese Brasserie—a cavernous restaurant run by a jazz pianist named Reika Alexander—has attracted a cross section of celebrities, artists, designers, musicians, and composers: Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, regulars; Julian Schnabel, since day one; Martha Stewart and Dave Chappelle and various Gyllenhaals and Coppolas. To EN they ventured on the regular for miso-glazed black cod, mochi croquettes enveloping Hudson Valley duck, and diaphanous homemade tofu. New York City spots like Rao’s, Emilio’s Ballato, Indochine, and Balthazar may qualify as better-known celebrity hangouts; for two decades, EN has been more of a celebrity sanctuary.

On one hand, who cares? Eating in proximity to celebrities does not make oneself a celebrity; partying with artists does not turn you into one. Have you ever eavesdropped on a bunch of creative people? They gripe, they gossip, they drop names. No one is discussing John Berger over Wagyu sukiyaki.

Lola Schnabel, Julian Schnabel, Marina Abramović, Todd Eckert, Jeffrey Deitch.

On the other hand, a scene—no matter how superficial—well, that’s part of why most of us are drawn to fame vortices like New York City in the first place. And it’s why I found myself at EN Japanese Brasserie’s farewell bash last month. This was the last of the legendary EN parties, and every inch of the space was filled with furs and sparkly dresses and tuxedos. It was the sexiest, swankiest wake since Alexander the Great’s golden sarcophagus. But a wake it was, for EN will close for good on December 22.

A scene is an amorphous thing. When you think of a place like Cedar Tavern, where Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko liked to drink, it wasn’t that every booth was occupied by an abstract expressionist getting sloshed. Sure, Dorothy Parker and her vicious circle had a table at the Algonquin—it was round—but average civilians made up the rest of the lunch crowd. A scene is something diffuse, atomized like a scent, and it’s the opposite of, say, a place that is scene-y. The latter, to my mind, is cool from the outside in; the former, from the inside out. A true scene tends to be relatively brief in duration, which is why twenty years of EN is nothing to sniff at, but a scene-y restaurant usually fizzles out or devolves into a tourist trap after a year or two.

Lola Schnabel, Julian Schnabel, J. Period, Sapna Neravanda Astman, Elaine Chappelle.

And yet scenes are important, really important, and not simply because they’re increasingly rare. The weird conversational drippings, the casual connection, that lingual ephemera that builds up over time—it all leaves a cultural residue. (Think of a scene as a sourdough starter. It can be used to grow a new scene in a different neighborhood, as long as you’re careful enough not to kill it.) After twenty years, that residue is tangible. It’s not that Lou Reed sat at a table with Julian Schnabel and Martha Stewart. (Lou frequently ate alone.) It’s that a space has spirit, and that spirit is felt by normies as by extraordinaries.

Sadly, scenes end and omnes exeunt. So it is in life, on the stage, and in restaurants, too. The building that houses EN Japanese Brasserie is owned by the Trinity Church through Trinity Real Estate. For years, the rent for hovered around $460,000 a year. Fine. In 2016, an international real estate company called Hines bought a 1 percent stake in the building, allowing them to control its management. Last year, just as Alexander’s lease was coming up, she was informed that the rent would be doubling —not that Alexander was given a chance to negotiate it—and the space was going to Daniel Humm, Swiss lord of fine dining.
Is Humm going to do something spectacular? Yeah, probably. And it’ll be really expensive and vegan. Will it be a scene? A scene of sorts. It’ll be a place where either the very wealthy congregate often or the somewhat wealthy do so occasionally. But a restaurant that is primarily filled with people who collect art, as opposed to making it, is not a scene.

Dave Chappelle.

But back to EN. For one last night in November—which tripled as a holiday party, a farewell, and a celebration of Alexander’s birthday—the room revved up again. At eleven o’clock, the ground floor was a thrum of glittering people, and the private room upstairs was the respite for the most famous ones. The long table was filled with cigarette smoke, much of it emanating from Dave Chappelle, who sat perched on a sofa. Chris Rock sat next to him, eating EN’s famous fried chicken. “I’m going to miss this,” he said, giving me a pound and apologetically explaining “fried chicken.” Rock reminisced with Mathieu Britton, a photographer, about Questlove’s fiftieth-birthday party at EN. “I got some great pictures,” murmured Britton.

As Rock and Chappelle smoked in one corner of the room, Julian Schnabel and his daughter, the artist and director Lola Schnabel, sat on the far side. Schnabel had put a blazer over his traditional pajamas. “I think I was one of the first customers,” Schnabel said. Like nearly everyone, he credited the consistency and authenticity of the food for his allegiance, as well as the magnetism of Reika Alexander herself. Scenes, like oysters, need a bed on which to anchor. Alexander was that anchor. She was born in Tokyo to a Taiwanese family, and her path to becoming a restaurateur was, like the best paths, circuitous. Finding Japanese culture too restrictive, Alexander moved to London to study jazz piano. She eventually moved to New York where, on the advice of her brother, Bunkei Yo—who runs a group of EN restaurants in Japan—she decided to open one of her own. “I wanted an authentic Japanese experience,” she explained.

Chris Rock, Dustin Yellen, JR.

The cuisine at EN has always been simple and straightforward, made with care. Like an arranger or composer, Alexander intuited that if the food ventured off on some crazy solo, very few customers would become regulars. Instead, the food is part of the ensemble—the drums perhaps, steady and consistent and reliable. Alexander focused on cultivating those regulars. Some were bold-faced. Many were not. When Lou Reed discovered he had diabetes, Alexander and her chefs devised a special menu for him and delivered it daily for almost two years. These details matter. Eleven years ago, when Joel Astman, aka DJ J. Period, proposed to his wife, Alexander distributed flowers to each diner in the dining room. When she said yes, each of them deposited their flower at the table of the affianced.

Over time, patrons became regulars and regulars became friends. “I taught August how to paint,” said Schnabel, pointing to Alexander’s 15-year-old photographer son. “Reika comes over to my house to play piano.” At the long table, Sofia Coppola sat across from her husband, Thomas Mars from the French band Phoenix. “We’ve been coming to EN since we moved up the street,” Coppola said. “Our daughter had her sweet sixteen here.” Just then I sensed a commotion behind me. Marina Abramović, another regular, had lost an earring. The famous scooted their chairs back and extracted their phones, turning on their flashlights and scouring the floor. “They’re real diamonds!” lamented Abramović, holding the earring’s gargantuan mate in her hand. Through the smoke and in the dark recesses of the table, we searched for her jewel. And although it was never found, it might be a small price to pay for an indelible scene.

Featured in the opening collage: Martha Stewart, Maye Musk, Dustin Yellen. Chris Rock, JR, Julian Schnabel, Reika Alexander, Dave Chappelle.