The COVID crisis has not only wreaked havoc on individuals and economies, its devastation to the restaurant industry is not yet calculable. In June 2020, the NYTimes published “More Than a Meal,” inviting culinary luminaries to share memories and stories about why restaurants matter and how they serve as meaningful gathering places in our collective experience. Here is my contribution in response:
Lost & Found at Kasadela
I am always playing a little game with myself to see if I can get from point A to point B in the most efficient way possible. The least amount of turns, the least restrictive traffic signals, the least amount of time wasted. My husband, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. He can live in a city for years and still need directions -- aimlessly turning here or mindlessly losing his way there. He doesn’t so much as arrive at a destination as stumble upon it.
But it’s in these meanderings that he discovers our world. While I’m distracted shaving .3 seconds from my record, he’s wandering down alleys and up staircases to hidden jewel-box drinking establishments, or shuffling down un-explored side streets to unearth the greatest Italian-import coffee vendor, or biking back and forth every street from 1st to 14th between Avenue B & C until he discovered Kasadela.
And it’s there, in this 20-seat izakaya that our story really begins. When my now-husband, then-boyfriend told me he found this “tiny Japanese spot," he thinks "I’m going to love,” I didn’t realize how impactful those 500-hundred square feet would become in our lives. The term regulars gets tossed around a lot but to actually be regulars at the coolest slice of the universe is another story.
When the proprietors -- Azuki, a painfully hip Japanese expat with a contagious smile and flair for streetwear and her lover/partner/bartender Stanley, a 6”1’ ebony-skinned Martian from the planet cool -- took a liking to us, we were soon tasting behind-the-bar soju, getting small bites on the house, and finding we could order from the menu without looking at it.
I would dream about their sticky-sweet Japanese chicken wings and days after eating them still smell the garlic, sugar, and sake glaze on my fingers.
We would default there. When plans weren’t firm or one of our cell phones died, we knew to meet at Kasadela.
It became so much a part of our lives that by the time we decided to get married and host an engagement party, the tiny, 20-seater somehow expanded to a 90-person standing-room-only, spilling-onto-the-street, friends-behind-the-bar, there-past-closing evening we will never forget.
Our experiences at Kasadela feel so connected to the early days of our relationship, that it is strangely sad and beautiful that they ended at the same time...We had decided our tenure in New York was closing, leaving family, friends, and favorite spots behind, we packed up to head West and enter the next phase of our lives together. It was then, barely a month after we moved to San Francisco that Super Storm Sandy washed our little oasis away. Kasadela, having been flooded and too small and too niche and too fleeting to rebuild, took its permanent place in our shared memory and early history, never to be returned to again.
Here in California we’ve carved out a wonderful new life, complete with two kids, new jobs, new experiences, and new haunts...and maybe even been branded a regular here or there. But all of them, none of them, can compare to that little spot on 11th street and Avenue C that Adam found when he was lost.
