Let's Get Weird

Apparently, there’s a Wong Kar-Wai undercurrent flowing through my life now. Last week, I heard WKW speak at the apple store. And last night, I got a few drinks from a bar that seemed a bit surreal, as if out of a WKW movie or a Murakami novel.

I wrote about Mark’s Chinese wedding banquet venue a few months ago. At the time, I commented on how the restaurant’s lobby reminded me of 2046 from some angles – antique retro-futuristic with odd mirrors, circular entrances, and a saturated color scheme. Well, that evening, across from the banquet hall entrance but a part of the restaurant, I spied a bar with no patrons. It was dark and it seemed possibly a chill place to get a few drinks. I made a mental note of it.

I walked in thinking the bar was affiliated with the Chinese restaurant so I ordered a green tea and Chivas. The bartender looked at me as though I was crazy and then started to speak Japanese. It turns out that it wasn’t a Chinese bar but rather an authentic Japanese jazz bar in a Chinese restaurant.

The bar was tiny and, yet, the actual bar itself, comically takes up two-thirds of the place. At one point, the owner, Shige, started to play the piano and eventually one of the bartenders started to sing a really interesting version of summertime on the mic for the four of us sitting at the bar.

According to them, there’s a reggae singer that comes through, Japanese belly dancers, and a jam session on Saturday nights. It seemed like the kind of place that would allow you to do anything if you told them that it was a performance.

I ended up calling the owners lazy after one of them brought out a huge tool box to fix the chair J sat on. And they misheard me calling them lazy and thought that I said, “Crazy.” They both laughed and laughed again when the bartenders corrected their misunderstanding.

My experiences with Japanese ex-pats in New York City are limited to my former roommate, her friends, and what I’ve observed in places like the east village. It’s another post or series of posts to explore them as a group but something about them tells me that they have it figured out in a way. They’re the mild-mannered beatniks of the current world.

I came back home and tried to find the bar online and see what the reviews had to say. There were none. It’s a poorly run place, managed by nonjudgmental businessmen with poor business skills, and therein, resides its charm. Definitely, going back and not telling many people about it.