Restaurants have enough trouble making money. But some operators are betting on nonprofit dining rooms to do it while making change.
Ikigai is a great restaurant. It’s also a good one.
At this new Brooklyn omakase, a recent dinner begins in the rear garden-turned-Japanese tea room with milk bread and miso butter, okra and lotus root pickles and kombucha-like rhododendron fermented tea. After a while, diners—a dozen per seating—are ushered into the subterranean dining room for the remainder of their 12-course, $165 meal. Chef Rafal Maslankiewicz, a veteran of Wildflower Farms in the Hudson Valley and Manhattan’s Eleven Madison Park and Masa, adds grace notes from Poland, his home country, to kaiseki, the most traditionally Japanese of meal formats.