On a Friday night after 10, the lights at En Japanese Brasserie, in New York’s West Village, are low. A D.J. in a leopard hat and purple T-shirt has just taken up his post behind vintage turntables next to two Westminster Royal Fidelity speakers. The sound system, including the McIntosh amplifier, is likely worth $80,000.
Opposite the music bar, two large abstract paintings by August, the son of En’s Taiwanese-Japanese owner, Reika Alexander, hang on the wall. August is 15 now, but he painted the canvases in Julian Schnabel’s studio when he was 10.
On any given night, Martha Stewart, Kate Hudson, or Questlove may stop in for dinner. This past spring, Derek Blasberg celebrated his 42nd birthday at En, where guests included Alexander Wang, Kris Jenner, and Jeff Bezos. When asked how she’s managed to attract all of these well-known patrons, Alexander chalks it up to fate: “Honestly, I think I just got lucky. The West Village is home to so many talented, creative, and influential people.”
On November 22, En hosted a party to celebrate its 20th anniversary. The festivities were bittersweet—the restaurant is set to close for good on December 22.
Alexander isn’t closing by choice. After granting her a one-year extension when her 20-year lease expired, Alexander’s landlord didn’t consult her for a renewal. “He didn’t even look at my offer,” she says. Eleven Madison Park’s Daniel Humm will be taking over and opening a new restaurant in the space. Alexander is devastated, but, as always, she keeps her composure. “I don’t want this to be a sad story.”
It’s not a sad story, but a quintessentially New York one. When Alexander moved to Manhattan from Tokyo, in 2003, she was an aspiring musician. She’d played in a band in Tokyo since she was 15 and moved to London in 1995 to study jazz piano at Middlesex University. Alexander’s British visa expired after graduation, and when she returned home she became depressed. “My parents were this very conservative Taiwanese couple who’d moved to Tokyo, and I was a rebel,” she says. “I fell into a very dark place.”
Her ticket out came from her brother, Bunkei, who owns a restaurant chain called En in Tokyo, and who suggested that she open one in New York. The next day, Alexander found an apartment in the East Village for a month.
In the early aughts, America hadn’t discovered izakaya (Japanese-style tapas) yet. The sushi wave was just beginning—Nobu had opened uptown in 1994 to rave reviews, and Bond Street had taken Peruvian-Japanese fusion downtown a few years later. The only traditional places were in Midtown, and they were unsexy, brightly lit, and packed with bankers. “I realized there needed to be a modern and authentic place in a Japanese style,” Alexander says.
The tumult that ensued from 9/11 delayed her plans, but she eventually settled on the West Village location, on Hudson and Leroy, in 2003. It was a bold move. The largely desolate corner was in the neighborhood’s forgotten quarter, and the industrial space was huge, with room for 180 seats.
Alexander designed the furniture herself, in collaboration with the Japanese architect Ichiro Sato, and pored over the floor plan with Balthazar’s Keith McNally, ultimately setting up different rooms to create a more intimate feel—two tatami rooms, three Western-style ones, and a large main dining area.
The restaurant opened to great fanfare in September 2004, with friends of Alexander’s, including the Icelandic singer Björk, attending the inaugural party.
But it wasn’t smooth sailing from the get-go. Alexander says Bunkei’s chef, whom she’d brought from Japan, didn’t respect her because she was a younger woman. And customers struggled to understand the traditional Japanese food on offer. “I had to recalibrate dishes that would serve the American palate,” Alexander says. So alongside multi-course Japanese meals of kaiseki and tofu tempura, “I started to serve sushi.”
In an effort to foster nightlife at the restaurant, Alexander extended the last call for dinner to one A.M. “It was a terrible decision in many ways. It was mostly empty,” she says. “But the restaurateurs came”—Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Marcus Samuelsson, and Scott Conant would all show up for sashimi and sake after their own dinner services had ended.
Soon enough, Schnabel started walking over from his pink palace nearby, Palazzo Chupi. Yoko Ono began stopping in for lunch. Larger crowds arrived after Martha Stewart had Alexander on her show in 2008.
When the “King of New York,” Lou Reed, was diagnosed with diabetes, Alexander created a “healing menu” for him featuring grilled vegetables, fish, and homemade tofu. The restaurant didn’t offer delivery, but at his request she began bringing him care packages for lunch and dinner almost every day.
And when Reed grew frail from liver cancer, in 2013, he still came to eat at En. On what would be his last visit, Alexander ran after him as he was leaving and hugged him, sensing it was good-bye. “I went back to my office and cried and cried and cried,” she says.
Over the years, people came and went. There were deaths and celebrations. In 2012, Alexander hosted the wrap party for Stewart’s TV show. In 2016, she hosted the Miu Miu fashion show. In 2018, after being courted by the hotelier André Balazs for nearly a decade, Alexander opened Chateau Hanare, a restaurant in a dilapidated cottage behind Los Angeles’s Chateau Marmont that closed during the coronavirus pandemic.
Back on the East Coast, En raged on. In 2021, Alexander hosted a birthday party for the rapper Q-Tip. Busta Rhymes, Dave Chappelle, RZA, and Chris Rock pulled up, and guests partied until dawn. Her record collection spans continents and decades.
At the closing party, which doubled as Alexander’s birthday celebration, 450 people gathered at En in black-tie outfits. August and Alexander, who wore a striking red dress, greeted guests. Elon Musk’s mother, Maye, also dressed in red, sipped drinks at the bar.
Marina Abramović, Sofia Coppola, Jeffrey Deitch, and Schnabel drifted up and down the stairs from a private room, where, later in the night, a frantic search ensued for Abramović’s missing diamond earring. The fashion designers Zac Posen and Anna Sui mingled in the main room, as did photographers Mario Sorrenti and his daughter Gray.
At around 10:30 P.M., Chappelle, Rock, Stewart, and Wang made speeches. When Rock took the microphone, he thanked Alexander for years of friendship, then addressed the crowd: “When this [restaurant] becomes a GAP,” he shouted, “we’re not going to shop there—ever!” A four-tier red birthday cake followed, after which the D.J. Alissia and the producer J. Period hit the decks. Fittingly for En, everyone danced.
“I was so happy to be surrounded by all my friends,” Alexander said after the party. “With so much love and support, I am so proud of what we built.”
“Because of Reika’s true love, her love for music, every aspect of the restaurant hits a high note,” says the artist Lola Schnabel, daughter of Julian and godmother to August.
“I’m going to miss [En’s fried chicken] almost as much as I’ll miss Reika’s ebullient personality and big smile,” Blasberg adds.
The toughest part of En’s closure, Alexander says, is saying good-bye to her staff, some of whom have been working with her for 20 years, and her community of regulars. “I don’t want to lose this family,” she says. Alexander is toying with the idea of opening another restaurant, but there are no concrete plans as of now.
When I ask Alexander what her secret is for keeping her cool in New York, where neighborhoods and their restaurants quickly go in and out of style, she doesn’t give me a straight answer. But a friend who lives nearby speaks for her. “It’s about soul,” he says. “She has a lot of soul.”
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at AIR MAIL
