Japanese Invasion
Glory be to globalization for bringing Beard Papa to the Upper West Side. This is the first Manhattan store for a Japanese chain of cream puff shops, promising light and tasty cream puffs, the best in the world. It opened last week, but the line we saw over the weekend stretched several storefronts away, and we didn’t want to stand in line. The weather tonight, though, was cold and drizzling, and the line was short, so I bought a small bag for dessert tonight.
These really are wonderful cream puffs, not heavy at all. You can see them baking them as you wait in line, and one of the counter girls filled each pastry just before they’re packed into the bags for the customers. All the counter girls are Japanese, and there’s a certain sushi bar vibe when they collectively say “Thank you!!” in that sing-song Japanesed English, an almost note-for-note arigato. The store is supposed to have mango pudding and cheesecake sticks later on. I’m looking forward to the mango pudding.
Another interesting thing is what’s happening along St. Marks Place. There’s now a Japanese restaurant there — just one out of dozens — that’s the first to have all of its signs in Japanese, with minimal English. There’s also the new St. Mark’s Marketplace, which was just opening up this week, where the staff seemed to be composed entirely of young Japanese expats. Perhaps we’re seeing the birth of a Japanese district in New York, sort of like the Korean commerical district near Herald’s Square, but with St. Mark’s Place as its Main Street.
There hasn’t been a Japantown in Manhattan before, I think mainly because the majority of Japanese that came to New York over the past decades have been expatriate salarimen and their families. They’ve moved here because they work for Japanese multinationals, and have generally lived in the suburbs. They’ve come because of work they found at home, not because they wanted to find themselves abroad. The Japanese who have moved into the East Village in the past decade, on the other hand, tend to be younger, poorer and unattached. They’ve perhaps come to reinvent themselves, and the feeling of this place is entirely different from what was there before. In a sense, are they actually American, an echo of the immigrants that have always come here and called this place home?