- [Ariel] There's a lot of contingencies
on opening a record bar and also a restaurant.
In some way, we want to feel a little bit more like
dinner theater than we want to feel like a tasting menu.
We've had a lot of psychological conversations
about what songs should go with what food.
- No discrimination here.
- No discrimination. - None whatsoever.
- Except for Meatloaf.
(traffic moving)
There was a tiny little Champagne bar here,
and on Thursday nights, we would do an event
called Tokyo Record Bar.
And I would have friends come in, and they would DJ,
and we would do some snacks.
And it was like a total party in here.
(record playing)
The music element of Tokyo Record Bar
was always kind of first and foremost.
I am so lucky that he said yes,
when I said, "Hmm, maybe we should do
a seven-course prix fixe menu for 50 bucks
that you will have to do three times a night."
- And we started writing down stuff immediately.
- [Ariel] When we created that framework for ourselves,
we started discussing, "Is this our take on Japanese food?
Are we just going traditional,
and we're just making really tasty stuff?"
And that kind of evolved into a hybrid of the two.
- Definitely taking influence from both, yeah.
There's actually 10 preparations served over seven courses.
The first three preparations will be
placed in front of you when you arrive.
Some snacks.
There's some togarashi-spiced popcorn,
some sesame-roasted pepitas,
and some spicy fermented cucumbers.
Then you'll roll into a piece of caviar sushi
with a little bit of puffed rice and an agedashi,
roughly a quarter-ounce of Kaluga caviar.
It's a very healthy portion, which isn't very traditional,
but nonetheless delicious.
It's just a really nice kind of extravagant way to start.
You're like, "Wow, what's next?"
- [Ariel] Yeah.
- [Zach] I think it's just a great opener.
Then you will get an oyster,
which changes daily depending on what we can get.
It's served with a dashi gelée and pickled ginger right now.
These preps change.
- [Ariel] Nightly.
- [Zach] Yeah, whimsically like all the time, a ton.
And then the next course would be a sashimi,
which also changes quite often.
Today it's an Aurora salmon.
Super-fatty, very beautiful fish.
It's served with a spicy aioli,
a nori wonton, and salmon roe.
(crowd murmuring)
Then we'll go into a mushroom gyoza, which is steamed.
And we serve this simply with a little bit of scallion
and a teriyaki sauce.
So then we serve a New York strip tonkatsu.
And we cut nice pieces of New York strip and we bread that,
and it's cooked in the fryer for 60 seconds.
It's served over a miso rice
with what I'm calling a cabbage bomb.
So it's super-flavorful cabbage sauce.
And that gets mixed into the rice
and then the tonkatsu goes over that
with a little bit of a soy glaze.
So right now we're doing a whiskey-infused chocolate cake
with a soy caramel fried shiso and a matcha cream.
- [Ariel] It's really good.
- [Zach] It's really nice, yeah.
- [Ariel] It's really good.
- [Zach] And we give you a nice portion of that.
- [Ariel] At the end of a very lovely Japanese meal,
you're always like, "That was really great,
but I could still eat a slice of pizza."
So we decided that we were going to
serve our guests a slice of pizza
to save them a trip at the end of their meal.
It's a surprise.
- [Zach] It is a surprise.
- [Ariel] Zach makes homemade pizza dough.
- [Zach] We make three every day.
- [Ariel] Yeah.
- It's not pizza in the round shape.
- Yeah, it's pizza.
- It's pizza in the pan.
We put what we call a cheese blanket over top,
cheese strands going everywhere.
It's kind of messy and sexy,
and it's such a great way to end your meal.
- There are these beautiful little record bars in Japan
that we kind of pay homage to, where there's a person
playing music every night of the week,
you know, from like 5pm to 5am,
just rolling tunes.
This is what we call a collective music experience.
Everybody in the room gets to select songs and send them in
and the first part of the experience here
is a DJ taking all those song requests
and compiling, you know, a cohesive playlist
that should impact the experience.
When you're eating your beef tonkatsu,
I'm probably doing something that's pretty chill,
because we want people to feel like their song choice
is the most important song choice that they have ever made
and that we have ever received.
I kind of wish I could relive that moment
the first time we put on Curtis Mayfield
and we heard "Pusherman."
It was the first song that we played
and I was just like, "Oh (bleep), this is gonna work!"
- [Zach] Everything else could suck,
and we still have beautiful music.
- I would pay 50 bucks to listen to that music any day.