Ninja

[rks]

Has anyone been? Looking for a reservation number or website to the restaurant.

Not sure how it compares to the best Japanese restaurants in the city, but I hear it's as pricey as Megu.

[adamru]

the number was in last week's times dining section... it's 212 274 8500. I'm trying it out on friday.

[flinflon28]

I believe this is the restaurant where the servers are dressed in ninja outfits. It sounds like a proposition that sounds dicey at best.

[adamru]

So much for my reservation there. I called on Wednesday. made a reservation for Friday at 10pm and was told to confirm it today. Instead they called me today to tell me they don't take reservations at 10pm - they don't seat past 9pm, that my reservation wasn't properly entered in their computer but hand written and stuck in their reservation book, and that they can't give me a table now on Friday because they're already overbooked. They apologized and offered me another day. I find it hard to believe that my reservation A.) wasn't properly made if I called them, they had my number and they knew my party size and time I wanted to dine there and that B.) they have no idea who made the reservation if it's true that it was actually hand-written in their reservation book.

I never even would have tried the place had I not heard some girl who works there, standing in front of my table and talking Bouley's ear off about their opening when I ate at Upstairs the other night. I hope she's not the same girl who somehow mistook my reservation.

[philadining]

B.) they have no idea who made the reservation if it's true that it was actually hand-written in their reservation book.

←

That's how it is with Ninjas, man, they appear out of the shadows, scribble reservations in the book, and slip back into the darkness undetected.

[Sethro]

A guy at my gym was telling me about this place (apparently he "auditioned" for a wait staff position), and I just assumed he was a compulsive liar. Now that I can confirm this place actually exists, some of the stuff he told me was required of the wait staff sounds absolutely unbelievable. For instance, apparently waiters are supposed to "sneak up" on tables--like ninjas!!! I can't believe this is a high end establishment, with hokey theatrics like that. I'm not sure my world is ready for a marriage of Nobu and Chucky Cheeses just yet.

[BryanZ]

Do they have a website yet?

[docsconz]

Anyone willing to guess how quickly this closes. This has to be the most absurd sounding "concept" restaurant ever if the above reports are accurate.

[herbacidal]

A guy at my gym was telling me about this place (apparently he "auditioned" for  a wait staff position), and I just assumed he was a compulsive liar. Now that I can confirm this place actually exists, some of the stuff he told me was required of the wait staff sounds absolutely unbelievable. For instance, apparently waiters are supposed to "sneak up" on tables--like ninjas!!! I can't believe this is a high end establishment, with hokey theatrics like that. I'm not sure my world is ready for a marriage of Nobu and Chucky Cheeses just yet.

←

Certain things are cool, like the outfits.

A great "concept" restaurant, like Pod in Philly.

But not a fine dining establishment priced that high.

And sneaking up on customers? Jeez, get real.

[raji]

My friend runs one of the local japanese freepapers and promotions companies. He went to a preview run of the restaurant and I think we are going to check it out soon. I think they ARE going with MEGU prices, but I'll post a review with pics when I can get there...

[Sethro]

My friends went to the pre-opening. They said the food was fantastic and the waiters are indeed "ninjas", right down to the facemasks. Apparently the all balck decor makes them hard to see comming, and get this: they all do magic tricks. I guess the captain of the wait staff is a trained magician, and everyone who works the floor is required to study under him.

I'm still not too sure how I feel about this...

[rks]

These 'interactive' theme restaurants/bars are popular in Japan. I guess the Japanese restauranteurs are bringing some of the flair stateside.

[adamru]

for better or worse I'm eating here tomorrow night. to the people who went to the pre-opening dinners, is it true I'd be underdressed without a jacket and / or tie? the mystery ninja on the other end of the phone told me "not so well" when I asked how jeans might go over there but was no less vague than that. I find it hard to believe they have a more demanding dress code than masa, nobu or morimoto but I guess I'll find out soon enough.

[adamru]

My girlfriend and I had dinner at Ninja at 9pm last night. We knew it was on Hudson and Duane - it's across the street from Danube - but the restaurant would have been very difficult to find had there not been a ninja doorman standing outside. Walking from a half block away to see this large squat man on a Manhattan street at night he immediately evoked Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for me. Upon being greeted by him, it was instantly clear he was instead a ninja version of Turtle from Entourage on HBO. Without seeing his face we knew he was white, american, and he wanted us to have an awesome time.

He led us behind the door to the hostess stand. There are two women here. One a hostess with her face uncovered and one a girl masked who is, let's say, standing guard. The hostess, while not the girl I've been speaking with to make my reservation immediately knows which party we are and I wonder if we're the only 9pm party that evening. (Afterward I realize we probably were.) She shows us into an elevator past the hostess stand and calls the doorman to return, he does so with a lantern in hand, to lead us on our "adventure." The clearest comparison here is to the entry experience at the Jekyll and Hyde Club on 57th Street. Earlier in the day when I explained where I was having dinner someone suggested, "oh, like Mars 2112" and I got defensive because I knew dinner was going to cost a few hundred dollars and it couldn't be like that. So I spoke about Pomp Duck and Circumstance, the german dinner theater experience which made a stop in NYC about ten years ago on its way to Vegas, turning DeWitt Clinton Park into a black tie gourmet Cirque Du Soleil - Cabaret dining experience. But no, this was the Jekyll and Hyde Club.

We asked our guide in the elevator if it's true he had to audition for his role here but he laughed that off and explained that no, he'd been training to be a ninja his entire life. I admire that he stuck to character to make the experience more believable and enjoyable but his body language, voice, energy, ethnicity were all in complete contrast to that.

Off the elevator on the second floor our guide gave us a choice, we could take the boring or the exciting path to our "lodge." We chose the exciting of course, and we were lead through dark cavernous hallways, up and down steps, until finally we reached a gap where I think a bridge was supposed to appear or fall down for us to walk across. Unfortunately we weren't allowed to use our own ninja skills to jump the divide and so we were lead through a doorway and took the boring path the rest of the way. On the way we passed one party of four, themselves eating in a "lodge." Also along the way were several masked staff members all in similar poses to the woman guarding the hostess downstairs.

A lodge is a small room about 7' x 7'. I really want to get the imagery right for you so let's say it like this. Imagine being in a booth at a diner. Now imagine that booth with one light overhead - a 30 / 70 / 100 watt bulb set to 30. And imagine on three sides of your booth there are faux-stone dark gray cavern walls that cannot be scaled to escape. And one side are three sliding black wooden doors that are barred and that a row of bars across at eye level have the spaces between them filled and blacked out so you can't see anyone coming or passing you at eye level. Okay now remember the diner booth? Instead of that, it's a rough-hewn black wooden table with holes in it (maybe the kind that would come from a sword fight for authenticity's sake) and that instead of a cushy booth seating you have foor plain chairs that I don't recall being padded. This is the "lodge." It's like a third-world interrogation room.

Oh and making it more difficult to get in and out, there's a folded tray stand behind the seat which they never actually even need to bring food during the meal.

Despite all of this, we're hysterical because it's novelty and we continually want to see what's going to happen next. We're optimistic for the food and the possibility of magic.

An actual japanese person arrives next, face unmasked, and presents himself as our waiter. He creeps to the middle door in a crouched position, makes a specific hand motion raising his right arm as if about to attack, makes a noise or says a phrase to announce his arrival, slides the door, rises and greets us. His departure is much the same way and this occurs with every appearance, so maybe ten arrivals and departures in our time there. It never gets old for us, and he seems truly happy that we're enjoying ourselves. He brings us the drink menu which offers cocktails, wine and sake printed on a black scroll that he keeps wound and tied in his belt and then unfurls on the table.

After this the dinner menu arrives with the same fanfare. On the bottom of the dinner menu it's explained the menu has ninja secrets within it and cannot be removed from the restaurant. We actually think for a second there's more to the menu than meets the eye and there are fun facts about ninjas or backstory or something somewhere but no, they just mean the menu itself. The menu offers six tasting menus ranging from two at $80, the most basic ten-course as well as the vegetarian, and they go up to $200, the most expensive being the beef and caviar tasting menus. A la carte, they offer sushi, rolls, hot and cold appetizers, entrees, salads and soups.

I can't imagine the menus were cheap to produce but they weren't proofed, Maine lobster appeared as "main lobster" throughout.

Curious we ordered a variety of hot and cold appetizers, salads, and rolls. After ordering they brought hot towels in a laquer box. However he didn't leave the box and there was nowhere but just on the table to leave the towels after using them.

We ordered tap water, they brought a large bottle of Voss and didn't charge us for it. It came up as tap on the check. Our cocktails came next, sake and green tea liquer were ingredients in a majority of them.

The first dish to arrive was the cebiche. It was a cold appetizer, a half tomato, quartered, topped with fluke sashimi in what must have been an oil dressing. That's about all I could say about it.

Next was the tuna. Three bites of tuna - there's no toro offered a la carte - paired with three hot tubes of cooked rice reaching twice as high as the bite of tuna. The sauce was made from japanese sweet or rice wine, he corrected himself often in describing things and left us a little confused. This was a standout course but it probably came to $5 a bite.

The next three dishes were the best tasting, the best value, and the most creative of the night. All of these dishes I would order again, although the first, the roasted roll, a roll of sea bass wrapped in rice and seaweed then roasted and sliced into at least a dozen pieces, required some sort of either cream sauce or soy sauce. The sauce from the tuna would have been fine. It was chewy and tasted a little dry toward the end. All the flavor wasn't cooked out of the fish but all the juices were. Next was the creme brule. A hot appetizer but it would make a great entree. It's basically pot roast. There's beef in a pot, topped with hot foie gras on a bed of au gratin potatoes which is from what the meal gets its name. Ordering it we had no idea what to expect but it was much more an authentic american dish, the only sense of fusion being the foie gras on top and the decorative pot. I don't think it's possible that it could have been baked all together because to eat the parts individually they didn't pick up the flavor of the other elements.

Next, the last of the three great dishes, was the salad, the suno-mono. It's the biggest bargain on the menu at $6. We ordered one, like we did one of everything else, but he brought and charged us for two. We didn't mind - they're small and they arrive in a cocktail glass. It's shredded chicken and spinach at the very least, at the bottom of the glass, all under a foam - the foam's what sold us on it - which tasted both salty and sweet. I wish I could tell you what the foam is made of but I didn't write the word down, I only recall the answer being a hyphenated japanese word. The most similar taste to it would be the broth of the toro tartare with plum at Morirmoto in Philadelphia.

One thing I ordered off the tasting menu, and maybe you can order whatever you want from it if you ask the kitchen, is the shizo and yuzu granite. It arrived next, rolled in cellophane paper like hard candies, they were granite bites that melt in your mouth as you suck on them. Nice presentation but no flavor.

Now dessert. Our sushi hadn't come yet, and our waiter knew that, but he returned with the dessert menu. Five choices, a soy milk pudding, a chocolate mousse, a chocolate cake with ice cream, a cream cheese cake, and something else, I think it involved fruit. We opted for the soy milk pudding for curiosity's sake and the chocolate cake with ice cream. I asked him if it was a warm or molten cake and he said it was. It wasn't at all, but it along with those three previous courses were the culinary highlights of the night.

After ordering from the fine paper dessert menu about the size of an index card, he took it, took out a lighter, set the menu on fire, and as it disappeared into a flame, he presented us each with...

...two business cards for Ninja! And he hoped we'd come again!

This was the magic? The menu didn't just go away in a cloud of smoke, the man set fire to it with a lighter right in front of us. We could have done that. And then business cards? Thanking us for eating there and hoping we'll come again when we still haven't gotten to the sushi course yet and we'd just ordered dessert? That all seems wrong somehow. Of all the things he could have made appear, maybe a little toy, paper throwing stars, something, but not that.

Sushi. We ordered the korean BBQ roll and the kampyo roll. I've always liked the sweet squash rolls from Hedeh which is my favorite sushi in New York. Our rolls arrived on a piece of wood that nearly stretched from one end of our cell to the other. It came with chopped chunks of ginger, but no wasabi. He did bring out soy sauce. The korean BBQ roll didn't need anything, it was beef wrapped in rice and then lettuce. The BBQ wasn't anywhere as sweet as the kampyo so the contrast in flavors worked out. The rolls were about $12 each. Five pieces of BBQ, ten pieces of kampyo which came wrapped in the squash. I didn't know why there was so much more of one roll than the other, but it's because he decided again to bring us and charge us for two instead of one roll.

Dessert. They never offered coffee or tea until they cleared our dessert away. The soy milk pudding was runny in texture like sour milk and was topped with a granite. It tasted like nothing. Absolutely no flavor at all could be attributed to it. And it looked gross, so that's that. The next dessert, the chocolate cake with ice cream, was called the bonzai. It arrived at the table as a potted bonzai tree. A flaky crunchy pastry made up the trunk and branches of the tree, the green of the tree on every branch was more of a custard than an icing and the soil was the chocolate cake. It was cold, came out in small clumps, it wouldn't hold together but it was moist in the pieces that held and not at all grainy. Beneath the cake was two kinds of ice cream, I think green tea and vanilla, and there was a small slice of strawberry that never repeated so maybe it found its way in there by accident. I think desserts were $10 or $12 - there are no prices on the dessert menu though - and the cake was worth it by far. I didn't really expect anything better than the soy milk pudding. I always feel like japanese restaurants don't make efforts with dessert. Everything is mediocre and the dessert menu even more limited at Bar Masa, and the bento box at Nobu gets old fast. So as far as japanese desserts, this is up there for me with the tirami su fondue at Hedeh.

I admit before the check came I started to feel claustrophobic. I don't know if they have non-caged seating, but I am glad we were given a four-seat lodge for the two of us rather than a two-seater which they also had. I'd like to see other people, and I'd like to see what they order and how they enjoyed themselves by comparison. After the check, $200 with tip - it could have been more since drinks and dishes had different names and lower prices than what we ordered - the waiter found a masked ninja guide to show us out. He took us the boring way, and then, before a door that would lead to a room that houses the elevator, he sought out his third eye to look past the door, performed for a solid thirty seconds some sort of motion with his arms to cleanse the way ahead, then he slowly opened the door to reveal... no one blocking our way to the elevator! Then I pushed the down button and the elevator came. We turned around and like Mary Katherine Gallagher jumping to one knee and shouting "superstar!" in the old SNL sketch, our guide jumped down to one knee, and shouted "thank you!" while unfurling a scroll stretched between his two hands that read, well, "thank you!"

We arrived at the ground floor, it was two hours later at this point and the hostess was gone, but the doorman was not. He was still very happy and energetic, come to think of it now, Chris Farley in that movie where he plays a ninja, that's exactly the personality if not the size of the man that comes to mind.

If I went back, I'd get a tasting menu, I'd bring more people, I'd have a few drinks beforehand, and I'd have a laughable fun time. I'm not going back any time soon but if it still exists a year from now I'd be curious to see what improvements were made to keep it afloat and running. They need to be open much later and they need to realize courtesy is not entertainment. I wanted to be scared or shocked or awed about something, anything. I did leave smiling and full but I could have done that twice over several other places in that neighborhood. If you're in the neighborhood, I think Upstairs at Bouley is the best show in town right now.

Edited September 20, 2005 by adamru (log)

[Sethro]

I always feel like japanese restaurants don't make efforts with dessert. Everything is mediocre and the dessert menu even more limited at Bar Masa, and the bento box at Nobu gets old fast. So as far as japanese desserts, this is up there for me with the tirami su fondue at Hedeh.

Dude, ouch! We had seven desserts on the menu at Nobu, as well as three specials dailly and an assortment of homemade ice creams and sorbets! Of course Nobu is fusion, and you're far more likely to find real dessert menus at a Japanese fusion restaurant that a strict Japanese sushi establishment. That being said there are several legit pastry chefs in NYC working Japanese fusiony joints.

Edited September 20, 2005 by Sethro (log)

[adamru]

With few exceptions, I haven't had every dessert at every japanese restaurant in the city. Overall I've found them subtle, sometimes to the point of forgettable on occasion. I think that subtlety is the nature of the cuisine though. The soy milk pudding was worse than anything I'd had anywhere else and the bonzai chocolate cake superb not just for a japanese / fusion restaurant, and I was just saying that was a nice surprise.

[BryanZ]

Aspects of Ninja, according to adamru's review, seem to be consistent with similar themed restaurants in Japan. It seems, however, that the execution and entertainment value truly aren't up to par. Based on the content of adamru's review I had a hard time believing that this place will succeed.

[herbacidal]

I'm wondering at what price point are the similar themed restaurants in Japan.

That's my particular problem. While the theme may be novel, and should be an entertaining attraction to the average diner, to me that doesn't mesh with the prices they seem to be charging. That they don't meet the anticipating level of food innovation and entertainment value only makes the value of the experience even worse.

[oakapple]

I'm wondering at what price point are the similar themed restaurants in Japan.

←

I haven't been to a restaurant like this, but in general restaurants in Tokyo are very expensive compared to their New York counterparts.

[BryanZ]

Oakapple is right. It's nearly impossible to compare high-end dining in Tokyo to high-end in NYC. The price difference is shocking even at the NYT 4-star level.

To answer herbacidal's question, however, I would say that at a similar-esque restaurant in Tokyo you could EASILY spend $130+ per person without any difficulty. To be honest, if you know where to go in Japan the sky is the limit.

[Daniel]

Adamru,

Really interesting, a super thorough review.. I feel like i was a fly on the wall at your dinner.. I am glad I didnt pay, and dont really feel any need to go there.. Loved the description of the lodge.. You seem to be turned off by white ninjas.. I am assuming you havent seen American Ninja One through Four

Edited September 24, 2005 by Daniel (log)

[oakapple]

I walked by Ninja yesterday at about 5:30pm, just to see what the outside looks like. Well, there's nothing there; not even a ninja standing otuside to greet you. In a small window to the right of the door, which you could easily miss, three of the tasting menus are posted inconspicuously ($80, $100, and $150). No mention of a la carte.

While I was perusing the menu, a couple walked back and forth along the expanse of Hudson between Duane and Reade, before asking a police officer, "Where's the restuarant Ninja?" I speak up and tell them I've found it. They say, "Thank heavens you spoke up, or we would have been lost."

It turned out the man is good friends with the owner, and he sourced the magician who taught the staff how to do the tricks referred to in the review upthread.

[BryanZ]

Bruni trashed this place. It seems inevitable that it will soon close. I was really hoping for something decent but Bruni only reaffirmed nearly everyone's fears and predictions.

[SobaAddict70]

In the name of "new style sushi" Ninja employs rice cakes as beds - or sometimes graves - for a rectangle of truffle-flecked omelet (it tasted like soggy French toast), a sliver of sautéed foie gras (pleasant, but how could it not be?) and a finger of seaweed-crowned mackerel (fishy in the extreme).

If a restaurant wants to promote six multicourse meals that range from $80 to $200, it should make sure that the menu on which these options appear doesn't have a big red food stain, as a companion's menu did.

It should also advise its ninjas that it's not nice to brag about having entertained a Hollywood celebrity who, by the account of the ninja in question, was the apparent beneficiary of recent breast augmentation.   I was happy for the disclosure and appalled at the indiscretion, as I was at so much else.

Ninja New York (Frank Bruni)

Related discussion regarding Frank Bruni's style of reviewing and the New York Times' star system can be found here.

Soba

[AzianBrewer]

Let's wage a bet here....give it another 2 months. Okay 3 months then...Oops, I forgot this is not a gaming site.