Getting Lucky At Maneki
Maneki opened in 1904 at Sixth and Main, in a three-story building that looked like a Japanese castle. A hundred years ago, it was turning 500 a night on the floor, in the tatami rooms and the bar--serving the Japanese community centered in that neighborhood, catering their weddings, their funerals. Feeding them on Tuesday nights when no one felt like making the soba or shishamo themselves.
World War II and the internment of Japanese-Americans put a gap in Maneki's epic run. The building that had already housed it for 40 years was ransacked and wrecked up by assholes, the customers carted off to camps. According to Maneki's official history, the space where it operates now was used as storage for the belongings of many of those who were interned during the war. When they came home, they all needed their stuff back. And when the space was finally emptied (somewhere around 1946), Maneki was reborn there--its walls covered with Japanese art, the paper screens of the tatami rooms erected, the bar built, the dozens of maneki niko good luck cats finding homes on every bit of horizontal space.
The place fairly sweats history.
And on a good night--a lucky night--you can be right there for a little piece of it, sitting amid the roiling crowds and fish and good luck cats, tearing through plates of octopus and tofu and vinegary bowls of cucumber and rock shrimp with a Ginza swagger, listening to the Japanese businessmen at the bar getting rowdy and downing sake and icy beers like it was a vocation, not just another night out on the town.
People have been telling me since before I showed up in Seattle that Maneki was one of those places that I was just going to love--historic and strange, a little difficult, a lot delicious. And now that I've been there, I know that all those people were right. It wasn't the best meal I've ever had, but my repeated visits to Maneki were some of the better nights I've had since washing up on this far shore. And come tomorrow, you can read all about it right here or, better yet, in the actual paper.
Hell, if you're lucky, you can just bring the paper with you to Maneki and eat while you read--shoving your face full of namban and sashimi while night falls outside and the bar grows crowded behind you. How delightfully meta would that be?
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