New Neighbor: Ozu

By on February 24, 2010 6:40 pm in Food
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Vittles Vamp photo

Nabe blogger Vittles Vamp has a first look at Ozu  at 78 Clark Street, opening soon in the old Sea Asian location.

Vittles Vamp: This is the owners’ first foray into the city (or at least into Kings County), with two Sumou Sushi outposts already firmly planted in suburban Long Island. But, this new Japanese-fusion spot promises to take the swank up a notch from its “Giland” brethren in both kitchen and front of house.

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  • Hungry Wolf

    I peeked in there yesterday…looks fancy indeed. Pretty amazing what they did with the space. Still, I wish it was a Pump Energy Food instead (sigh).

  • C.

    Another Asian place? *sigh*

  • nabeguy

    Given all the Asian restaurants on the block, maybe it should be renamed Crark Street. (yes, I do know how un-PC that is, but I couldn’t resist).

  • Heights Low

    I wish them the best but with all the strollers in the hood and the dearth of Asian places it will be a tough road on a daily basis. I welcome anything new. Sushi Lounge does the fusion thing right….

  • Joe

    nabeguy why is ok for you to make an Asian joke but not ok for willowtowncop to make a comment on the Stench in Court Street Station thread that he/she must have gotten used to the urine smell from being in project elevators to often?

    I’m not opposed to your joke at all (its certainly not PC but I’m not a stick in a mud about light racial jokes unless its downright offensive), however, I think your post is definitely more offensive than what Willowtowncop wrote. Additionally I didn’t find anything wrong with what Willowtowncop posted. I assume he/she is speaking from personal experience as a cop and that he/she is speaking the truth. If that is the fact why does it need to be sugarcoated? Certainly none of the buildings I’ve lived in the Manhattan or Brooklyn have elevators that smell like urine except when one neighbor was illegally fostering a dog in her apartment and the dog had peed in the elevator a couple of times when she couldn’t get him out of the house fast enough.

  • Joe

    ^oops didn’t mean to say “illegally” meant to say “against Coop rules”. I doubt she would have gotten arrested or got a summons from NYC police dept for housing the dog.

  • AEB

    Joe, the line between the comment that exploits stereotypical notions in a fashion that is, let’s say, benign, and those that do the opposite is a thin one.

    That line also moves: a group may call itself by names normally assumed to be expressions of bigotry while outsiders may not–or may not without censure.

    Not every un-pc comment defames an entire group of people. I think nabeguy is, in this case, on the right side of the law, so to speak. On the other hand, I find Willowtowncop’s comment iffy.

  • othersideofthebridge

    I didn’t read the original thread but project elevators DO smell. Why does everything have to be racist? I think the tenuous line of thinking that makes the comment racist says more about the thoughts of the person analyzing the statement than the person that made the comment.

  • hicks st guy

    another sushi place?

  • tb

    so much fighting going on. Can we talk about the sushi place in the 2/3 station for a while?

  • PJL

    Isn’t it even far more racist to assume that living in a project is reflective of one’s race (or vice versa)??

  • Billy Reno

    Haha! Crark Street…that’s awesome!

  • rooco

    In all seriousness, the North Heights Chinatown has really reached new Heights… so to speak. Between Fortune House, and of course Great Wall (perfection), Flushing is well in our rearview mirror.

  • AEB

    Great Wall? Is that in Brooklyn Heights?

  • rooco

    You’ve never heard of it?

  • AEB

    Oh, Rocco, jest joshin’.

    Past threads here have made something of a fetish ( if that’s the way to put it) of Great Wall, and I was goofing on that…

  • FYI

    I’m not digging the racism in this thread. Why do some people think this is acceptable/funny? It’s just making your site and Bk Heights residents look bad. If you wouldn’t say it to an Asian person’s face (and I’m betting a coward like you wouldn’t), then don’t say it on the internet, nabeguy (and others).

  • http://selfabsorbedboomer.blogspot.com Claude Scales

    FYI: Since you found it offensive, I’ve deleted my comment. By way of extenuation, I don’t think “l/r” confusion is in any way indicative of anything pejorative, any more than is my inability to pronounce “r” like a native speaker of French.

  • nabeguy

    Folks, it was a stupid joke and I admitted as much in the post. Don’t make more out of this than need be. Before you reach for the race card, you should know that when I grew up in the Heights in the 60’s and 70’s, it was a true melting pot of race, religion and ethnicities. Egyptians playing punchball with Jews. Chinese sharing stoops with blacks. Italians pitching softballs to Lithuanians. Did tensions ever arise based on our backgrounds? Of course they did. But then we realized that we couldn’t play a full court game without any one of us, and quickly forgot our differences in deference to the important matters at hand…namely, who gets the rim that isn’t bent.

  • FYI

    Kudos for considering others, Claude. I really think discussions like this make us all look narrow-minded. And nabeguy, I don’t know your background or history, and you don’t know mine. However, just because you don’t consider yourself a racist, and heck, may not even be a racist, doesn’t mean that your statement isn’t or couldn’t possibly be racially offensive to someone. Just because you grew up in a “melting pot” doesn’t give you license to crack racial jokes because you feel you’ve earned some sort of “pass.” You may be able to do that privately with your melting pot of friends, but just because they’re okay with it doesn’t mean that everyone else of a different race will be. We’re all individuals, and assuming no Asians/other groups should be offended by your comments because you’re not racist or perhaps because your other Asian friends weren’t is just more of the same “they all think as a group” logic that leads to stereotyping.

    Again, if you wouldn’t say it to a stranger’s face, then you probably shouldn’t say it on the web either.

  • GHB

    It might be OK if the “joke” was even mildly funny but alas, it wasn’t.

  • hoppy

    As someone of Lithuanian descent, Nabeguy, I take offense at your “softball” comment.

  • nabeguy

    FYI, you’re right, you don’t know a thing about my history or me yours. But I’ll put my upbringing up against yours any day in terms of diversity and the lessons I learned from it. What you refer to as racism, we called “doing the dozens” and it was our way of getting past the obvious differences between us to appreciate the things we all had in common. I don’t know what neighborhood you grew up in New York (if, in fact, you did) but I’m proud to say that I learned my golden rules of social interaction right here on the stoops of Hicks Street. And even prouder to say that I’m still friends with the Chu’s, the Chesnulovitches, the Kasses, the Killeens, the Chins, the Powells, the Spano’s and all the other diverse families that made my upbringing so rich. People that understood that a bit of cultural ribbing was part of the indoctrination process to becoming a “true American”. I know that sounds outdated, but many of my childhood friends were 2nd or 3rd generation, so it rang much truer back then. IMHO, if the U.N. would institute a monthly “dozens” session, most of the world’s problems would go away.
    And yes, GHB , it was a rather weak joke, hence the apology.

  • WillowtownCop

    What was “iffy” about my comment, AEB? Why is “project elevators smell like urine” any different than “subway stations smell like urine”? No one had any problem blaming the homeless guy over the stink in the subway, and calling for the city to scrub the place out (and “relocate” him) as soon as possible. How would you like to live where the city doesn’t send people to scrub the stench out of the building where you live? You might have to put up with an offensive smell in the subway station for as long as you have to run past in on your way to your nice brownstone, but some people have to live with it. And of course you assume that my comment was racist, right, because white people don’t live in the projects? There are projects that are almost entirely white. There are Hasidic projects in Williamsburg, Russian projects in Coney Island, Italian projects on Staten Island- and guess what? They all smell just as bad as the black projects in Brownsville, because the city does not take care of them. Furthermore, I am on a first name basis with most of the junkies in the mostly black and hispanic Gowanus Houses. The junkies who come to shoot up in the stairwells, who don’t actually live there, who are the ones sleeping on the roof landings and slop sinks and using the elevators as a toilet, are mostly white. They spend their days hanging around in front of the bodega on Bond and Baltic if you’d like to look for yourself- ask for Daisy.

  • hoppy

    Back to the thread topic, it would be great if this was one of those Japanese places where the sushi chefs loudly shout your order amongst themselves— “CHICKEN TERIYAKI!!!……CHICKEN TERIYAKI!!!”

  • AEB

    Surely the issue of race is EXTREMELY complicated; we all bring prejudices, biases, prejudgments of all kinds to the table. We are, I believe, predisposed to judge first a priori, which in fact is a basic, hard-wired survival necessity.

    The issue, then, concerns kind and degree–and that biggie: acting out. I think arguing about racism (in a tolerant fashion!) is a good thing, as it brings to light things that, left unsaid, tend to fester, to feed and/or reinforce ignorance and fear of others, who then become Others. Nothing like “us.”

  • The Where

    This thread is gay.

  • nabeguy

    willowtown, since I created this tempest, I’m glad you responded, if not directly, to my comment. I apologize to you for what was clearly a miss-read of your verbiage. Call me racist, but when I hear the word “projects”, I hear urban code-speak for “poor blacks”. On the other hand, I think you’re being a bit coy by applying the term so generally. I have a hard time believing that the Hasidim in Williamsburg or the Italians in Staten Island think of their residences as anything other than “housing developments”. Whatever. Poor is poor, and when you don’t have a pot to piss in, then where ever you are is home, regardless of what you call it or, more importantly in this case, treat it.

  • nabeguy

    TW, could you please just go to the other room and find something to set on fire and allow us adults to talk?

  • No One of Consequence

    The Where is awesome.

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