Dinner Party: Chef Abe Cooks Staff Meal-Inspired Dishes

My friends at EN Japanese Brasserie are planning a very special dinner party on Saturday, January 16th. The theme: "fish heads, eel bones and beer" -- in other words, food (and drink) inspired by traditional Japanese restaurant staff meal cooking. The host: yours truly. I hope you can join us. Here's the blurb on the event:

In a Japanese restaurant kitchen nothing gets wasted. Cooks make magic even with humble ingredients like fish heads, bones, vegetable peels, and scraps of rich wagyu beef, turning them into delicious, irresistible dishes. But not dishes for the customers -- foods for the cooks themselves. These wondrous restaurant-family meals, called makanai, have inspired EN's Chef Hiroki Abe to cook a lustrous tasting menu of tasty treats rarely found on a Japanese restaurant menu here. Join us on Saturday, January 16th, at 10 pm, to enjoy Chef Abe's creations the way his team does at the end of a busy shift--relaxed, with beer in hand. Dishes include: sake-marinated whole roasted tuna collar, crispy salmon skin salad with aromatic yuzu-citrus dressing, fresh tofu salad, delicate sea bream-head soup, crunchy deep fried eel and fluke bones, braised wagyu beef tips, sashimi ends over vinegared rice, and steaming butajiru, hearty pork and vegetable miso soup. Dinner includes all the beer you can drink, of course. Chef Abe and his cooks wouldn't have it any other way. $45. Please call 212.647.9196 to reserve.