Ninja New York Dining Review
Ninja, the toughest reservation to get in Akasaka, Tokyo, has established an American beachhead way downtown at 25 Hudson Street. The eye-catching Ninja is a dark, magical, mysterious catacomb of a place. The mystery starts when diners try to find it. That’s because there are three 25 Hudson Streets. The least obvious of them is a tiny, barely visible, unmarked door.
Enter and find yourself in a small cave with an elevator that whisks guests up to a room populated by black-clad, masked Ninja warriors wearing sword-like daggers. One of them leads you along a winding, dimly lit passageway of draw bridges and flaming torches to a restaurant that is the recreation of an 18th-century Ninja village that took three years of planning and seven months of construction. In many ways the upstairs, six-month-old Ninja, with its maze of cave-like walls and wood-slatted doors, is Manhattan’s most exotic, unique, unusual restaurant. Gimmicky? Yes. Show biz? Surely. But it’s fun.
Yet Ninja is more than a unique scene. It’s a serious Japanese restaurant like none you’ve ever seen: A Japanese restaurant that serves borsht and foie gras, that offers dishes with French and Italian spins as well as traditional fare like sushi, tempura rolls, udon, soba noodles, and sushi rolls.
But at Ninja the wasabi is fresh and grated at your table, some dishes are cooked on 800-degree hot rocks, their ginger is homemade, their miso soup contains tiny Manila clams, tableside and center-of-the-table cooking is common, and diners order drinks and food from mammoth roll-out silk scrolls that take two people to fully extend.
Desserts are given a “blizzard” by grated white chocolate that gently floats down over them. Those desserts supply maximum “wow” impact. The bonsai tree sweet looks exactly like a diminutive plant. But look closer: The soil is chocolate, the trunk is made of cookies, and the leaves are a green-tea amalgam. A cheesecake comes in the shape of a frog. Awkward to eat? Yes. But a real kick as well.
They are, like Ninja itself, far off the beaten path, an adventure, and an experience.
25 Hudson St. btw. Reade & Duane Sts., 212-274-8500
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