Brooklyn Summer = Japanese Burgers and Sweet Milk Ice Cream!
Review: Cafe O'Te's $35 wagyu burger, Haymarket's spicy shrimp, Malai's Sweet Milk ice cream. Plus: Melanie Dunea's photos and Ayaka Matsui's music
Is there a growing tinned fish backlash?
I like eating tinned mussels at home. Peel back the top of the can, crack open a hazy IPA, and that’s it.
But here’s thing: Perhaps there’s too much tinned fish out there there days. Perhaps we’re losing something if these excellent products become the next caviar...a ubiquitous lifestyle luxury that connotes coolness.
Anna Hezel, who literally wrote the book on conservas, takes a smart, skeptical look at tinned fish in restaurants and elsewhere, over at Taste. Here’s a key line:
But I too have felt a bittersweet twinge on occasion, watching a once-nerdy pursuit become corporatized…For me, tinned fish was never meant to be something we incorporate into every meal and every outfit, every day. Sometimes I see a brand trying to convince me to make canned albacore nachos, and I think to myself, “I don’t even want that.”
Hezel was nice enough to quote me in the piece!!! You can also read my own tinned fish column right here from the other year.
This Stupid Week!!!
It’s Friday, 18 July 2025, and New York’s humidity levels have made the city feel like a hot ziplock bag filled with old sourdough.
Here’s my advice for cooling off: Try some cold noodles. Or go pick up some Malai sweet milk ice cream. It’s creamy and milky. So milky! Honestly, Malai packs such a powerful dairy punch that it’s as if the Brooklyn purveyor decided to make gelato out of a triple-creme fromage from Normandy. And yet, it’s still quite light. I picked up a pint from my local bodega for about ten bucks. You should do the same.
Also of note this week: Stephen Colbert — who on Monday called CBS’s $16 million settlement with Trump a “big fat bribe” — announced that his show was being cancelled. The network cited financial concerns, and indeed, late night ad revenues have cratered, the NYT reports. And yet…it’s hard not to see the move as a big part of our country’s ongoing crackdown on dissent, by the president, by his supporters, and by those who simply decide to throw in the towel and kiss the ring. “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired,” President Trump wrote on Truth Social today.
A quick bit of economic news: Consumer prices are up now that the Trump Tariffs are taking hold, and food prices could jump up even further if the president keeps his word on duties threatened against the EU, Mexico, and Canada. Here’s Eater’s Jaya Saxena on how restaurants are adapting to the tariffs — by tweaking their menus as ingredients like citrus and fish sauce rise in price.
Finally: “Empire of the Elite,” Mike Grynbaum’s new book about the heyday of Condé Nast, and the journalists there who made way more money than all of us, is out!
Scroll past the paywall for a fun burger review, and for notes on this awesome Charlotte Druckman essay on Melanie Dunea’s food photography. But first…
Obsession Session: Ayaka Matsui on Wagyu, Noz Sushi, Synesthesia
We’re bringing back one of our favorite features!!
Ayaka Matsui is a name you should know if you care about good beef. Or great music.
The Tokyo-born Matsui heads up the House of Japanese Wagyu Campaign for the Japanese government. She’s also a brilliant pianist.
I met Matsui during a private concert in Chelsea in 2023, where she performed an improvisational piece inspired by the sounds and energy of the forest. In June, she debuted her new work, “Ascent,” with The Kollection in Bushwick. It’s a moving, melodic piece that she composed the night she lost her grandmother.
Matsui, who lives in Los Angeles, told me the other day that she’s a big fan of Noz 17, one of my favorite sushi spots. And so I invited her onto Obsession Session to chat about it. We also talked about her synesthesia — a condition where one sense triggers another, like when hearing music causes someone to envision a color…or prompt an olfactory response.
RS: Okay, I write about red meat a lot here at The Lo Times. What’s your favorite Japanese Wagyu dish?
AM: That's a difficult question because I've tried so many different preparations. But I always come back to sukiyaki. I love sukiyaki! The Wagyu will be thinly sliced and cooked super quickly. And you dip it in raw egg usually. You can really feel the texture in such a unique way, like the way it melts. And you get the flavor of Wagyu, and the aroma. All of it comes through in sukiyaki. It’s just like my ultimate favorite from growing up in Japan.
RS: Do you have a favorite restaurant in Los Angeles or New York for Wagyu?
AM: For sukiyaki, I was impressed by Momokawa on the Upper East Side. Yeah. Chef Mie Okuda does an amazing job at Wagyu sukiyaki….
RS: You talk a lot about texture. What should be the texture of Japanese Wagyu sukiyaki?
AM: It just melts in your mouth.
RS: I love that you love Noz 17 in Chelsea, which ranks with Sushi Sho as one of my favorite fancy sushi spots. Why do you like it so much?
AM: It's just, everything felt like a masterpiece, you know, and and the balance of the vinegar and then the rice that's complementing the fish and also the amount of how each nigiri is seasoned too, whether it's with ginger or it's with sweeter soy sauce, everything felt so harmonizing with everything else that was in the course. So yeah, it felt like a beautiful orchestration. There was a flow to it. I think of culinary experiences as kind of like music and I found everything so harmonizing, with the fish and the rice, from the beginning to the end.
RS: You said Noz 17 felt like an orchestration, and I think that’s interesting because the owner himself told me a few years ago that the menu reminded him of freeform jazz. It’s a unique menu that doesn’t go straight from small plates to sushi. The long menu intersperses nigiri with drinking snacks and sashimi in a sometimes unpredictable order.
AM: I think freeform might be like perception, right?…I think it felt very intentional. I feel like freeform can be intentional as well, but you know, it's not always, right? It just felt like the right orchestration. Like it felt very much composed, actually.
RS: You’ve been open about how you’ve experienced synesthesia from childhood. Is it primarily with music or do you ever experience it with food?
AM: Even though my synesthesia is primarily sound to color and then vice versa, I feel that all my sensory experiences are heightened and there is definitely a strong connection with the taste and the emotions that it may evoke. Or, you know, sometimes I hear music when I taste food. And maybe another thing I really liked about Noz 17, it’s that there was no music. And that allows me to go deep into the tasting experience when there's no distraction…
RS: Can I just briefly ask, when you play or listen to music, can you describe what happens in terms of your synesthesia?
AM: So I feel colors in my body. I see it in the back of my head. I know it sounds crazy, but a lot of times when I play, I close my eyes. And I see the colors. I know it sounds strange, but I see the colors. So when you eat, say, pizza, your tongue and your taste buds know that you're eating pizza, but your body also knows that you're tasting pizza, right?
RS: Right
AM: It's kind of similar. When I'm playing, say, F major, I feel yellow in my body.
RS: Wow. And what does yellow feel like?
AM: Yellow feels like this beautiful, warm, happy, bright feeling.
RS: What colors do you feel when you play “Ascent,” the piece you composed and played the night you lost your grandmother?
AM: I think it's light purple turning into like translucent white. It's just really majestic, light purple, yeah, lights shimmering in. That's how I feel the music.
RS: Do you think there’s a reason for that?
AM: Yes, I think this might be like a layered answer, but purple is a color that I think of when I think of my grandma and also I think purple has some sort of significance in Japanese culture. I need to learn more. I don't wear a lot of purple but when I wear a kimono for some reason I lean towards purple. When I think about female ancestry I somehow think of purple and this song particularly came to me when my grandma passed and so I think I imagine her ascending to heaven wrapped in a light of purple and there's a symbol of a white dragon and snake that has been coming through to me, when I feel connections to my grandmother's spirit.
RS: On a final note, you were telling me you’re a fan of Okonomi in New York, a well-respected restaurant that folks don’t seem to talk about a ton. What do you like about it?
AM: Okonomi brunch and breakfast! It's a traditional Japanese breakfast that I feel nostalgia towards. Every time I feel sort of homesick with Japan, I go to Okonomi and have that traditional Japanese breakfast. A wholesome, feel good, healthy, delicious breakfast. And it's always reliable….The rice and the miso soup and some sort of grilled fish and then maybe a side of ikura and some veggies. It's a very traditional Japanese breakfast that I used to eat at home.
You can stream “Ascent” — which Matsui performed alongside a live painting by Marcela Avelar — on Spotify and elsewhere! This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity!
Shall We Try This $35 Wagyu Burger Platter in Greenpoint? Yes!!!
