Small plates big taste
In a back-alley Virginia Beach patio, Baby Izakaya is a casual blockbuster of Japan-inspired dishes
On my third visit to Baby Izakaya, the bartender told me I was drinking like a Japanese woman in the ‘80s. It wasn’t an insult, and it wasn’t a compliment. It was a simple fact.
The cocktail in question was a spumoni, a pretty rose-pink drink mixing grapefruit and tonic and aromatic Italian bitter liqueurs. But despite its ingredients, the drink is unknown in Italy — a Japanese creation inspired by Tokyo’s obsession with sunny-day quaffs had on the boot.
In what amounts to a bit of a magic trick, the drink was neither bitter nor sour. It was a miracle of lightness and balance and even a touch of floral sweetness. It tasted, pleasantly, pink. Both obscure and a little festive, the drink seemed custom-made for a hidden and Japanese-inflected patio bar close to the sea.
Luckily, that’s where I’d found myself. Tucked behind a onetime warehouse in the Virginia Beach ViBe district, on a skinny side road that doesn’t even get its own number — 17 1/2 Street — Baby Izakaya’s rear patio is a place of deep cuts and still deeper flavors. It is a home to both some of the most sophisticated cocktails at the Beach, and an inventive small plates menu that spans comfort and delicacy: boomingly rich ramen and the airy subtlety of salt pickles, togarashi-spiked fried chicken and a peacock
And yet it remains both casual, and casually priced — a place where you could choose to tap out at around $20 with ramen and a snack, or blow up the spot with a spread of varied bites.
Its patio, a lovely and Christmas-lit stretch of picnic tables and blond wood, bordered by paper lanterns and cursive neon, wasn’t even supposed to exist. Not yet, anyway. It is instead an emergency patio, hammered together by owners and staff during pandemic times.
Kevin Ordonez, founder of wildly popular ramen bar Alkaline in Norfolk, had designed his new Baby Izakaya to be true to its name: a tight-quartered chef ’s counter modeled after the tucked-away pubs of Japan. But in March, just a week after opening, he had to shut down to retool, opening again in October with a spacious outdoor spread. A precious few seats are still available inside, for those more concerned about chilly weather than the chilling threat of indoor air as coronavirus cases continue to rise in Virginia.
But for now it’s that newly built al fresco dining room, soon to get its full complement of heaters — one for each table, like a snuggie built for four — that makes Baby Izakaya one of the most remarkable and welcome additions to Hampton Roads’ restaurant landscape this year. To try it, you might just have to wear a coat.
The essence of the experience at Baby Izakaya is its scattershot shotgun of Japanese-inspired small plates, each one simple and each with hidden depths. There are very few missteps here, so feel free to order with impunity. Get a broad array to share, and it’s a bit like shiatsu massage applied to pressure points on the palate.
In general, expect the smallest dishes on the top of the menu, the heartiest at bottom.
Each meal should include a touch of lightness to complement the umami bombs elsewhere on the menu, whether pickles or grilled salad. The $5 salt-andkoji pickles are a lovely vegetable medley of light ferment and very little acidity, while the grilled salad is a wonderful balance of earthy sesame and tart citrus. The also-light hamachi sashimi is five small bites whose flavor has been developed with koji ferment, some of the finer raw fish you can expect locally.
Then, play with the fried snacks to share. The kara-age fried chicken nuggets and fried oysters are both light and crisp at once, made with a seasoned house corn-and-flour breading. The well-managed oysters are pure Virginia until you dip them
in the light funk of its tuna-inflected sauce, while the kara-age is a riot of spice and juicy thigh served with sweet mayo.
Gyoza are meaty, nutty wonders, served on a crunchy sheet of fried dough popular in Japanese izakayas. The potato wedges, meanwhile, were an elegant kettle-corn surprise mixing the sweetness of brown sugar with Japanese togarashi spice and salt, a thin crust of crispness with potatoes so soft within they might as well be mashed. The fried brie is perhaps the weakest link among the fried dishes: delicious because fried cheese, but without the pop and surprise of the other plates. But you will fill up with the meats and ramen at the bottom of the menu.
The ramen, in particular, is a dish for cold weather days, a bowl of warmth from within. The Northern-style miso ramen bowl served here, unavailable at Alkaline, stems from the ice-sculptured landscape of Hokkaido, Japan’s northern island.
Ordonez had said upon opening Baby Izakaya that he didn’t want Baby to be a ramen bar. But if that’s the case, he shouldn’t have made it so delicious.
That $15 bowl is the most accomplished at either of his restaurants, and easily some of the best in Virginia Beach, with tight-waved and toothsome Sun noodles meant to hold up to the miso-rich loudness of its broth.
The broth’s boom comes from the flavor and marrow of a chicken and pork-trotter stock, leavened with delicate yellowtail dashi and the added umami of chicken garum — an ancient Roman style of fermentation recently revived at Denmark’s famed Noma restaurant. Still more umami arrives in the form of sausagy stir-fried pork in place of the customary chashu, a pleasing addition of meaty chew that distributes throughout the bowl.
Not rich enough yet? Good. There’s also butter and corn, the way they do it in Sapporo, though here the corn comes roasted and the butter deepened with the undertow of scallion. Even without the complexity of its white
miso, the bowl is an umami bomb of nuclear proportions, a raised middle finger to winter.
And yet, the cacio e pepe mazemen was the most fond surprise on the noodle menu. Mazemen is brothless ramen, a no-rules playground for Japanese chefs mixing up noodles with unexpected flavors. Baby’s is an Italian-Japanese mash-up, an alkaline take on the classic Roman pecorino cheese and pepper dish, fatted up with butter and soy cured egg and a pretty flourish of black tobiko roe. The dish is a David Chang staple employed to lovely effect, creamy and rich with just the right edge of chew.
Another dish also toys with Italian-Asian flavors, in what has been an early hallmark of the restaurant. This may be unsurprising given the biography of Baby’s chef de cuisine, Matt Clement, who collaborates with Ordonez on the menu. Clement comes from an Italian family and is a veteran of Continental fine dining in Hampton Roads and Nashville, who has already experimented with an Italian-Filipino pop-up at Norfolk’s LeGrand Kitchen last year.
The $13 smoked beef ragout, the heartiest dish on a menu that veers toward small bites, is like an old-world Italian Bolognese made with long-smoked brisket, except that its “pasta” are thick and chewy Korean rice-cake tteokbokki. It was a comfort-food mash-up that I both appreciated and struggled with in its surprising textures, the chew of both beef and rubbery tight-ground rice, the spiky counterbalance of bitter greens, the unabashed salty richness of pecorino cheese.
Did it work? I didn’t honestly know: I wasn’t sure the rice cakes integrated with the flavor of the rest of the dish. But I also know that I thought about it for days later, perhaps more than any other plate on the menu — and that it will likely be what I order when I arrive at the restaurant again.
The other beef dish, a slab of long braised and grilled brisket compressed into dense meatiness, was an addictive pleasure,
buoyed by the tang and depth of miso and dusted scallop. And if it was difficult to eat with chopsticks, the effort was well-rewarded.
The restaurant has a habit of layering its umami, one version of savory meeting another. This is equally true on a masterpiece of binder-free blue crab served under a crumble of crunchy rice cracker, made with gentle chile spice and a house cashew-sunflower miso that took months to mature. It is a lightly acidic take on Japanese ferment made for the people of Virginia, crabbier than crab could be alone.
Among many visits and plates, really only the togarashi-dusted, smoked pork ribs truly failed as a dish; the restaurant’s chefs have not long been in the business of barbecue, and the ribs on two tries were dry and a little chewy, shattery and stubborn on the bone.
Among drinks, the short sake menu includes rarities and leftfield surprises, and bartender Jonathon Reynolds’ cocktails offer a blend of refined classics — a Manhattan with plum notes from both Madeira and the choice of whiskey — and fun innovations, in particular a surprising tequila-mezcal number deepened with a whimsical flourish of pure MSG.
Baby’s is, in fact, immediately one of the most exciting drink lists in the city. If it’s missing anything important, it’s a low-cost beer for those who just popped by for a bowl of ramen; while the $10-$11 cocktails are far from overpriced, the cheapest tipple of any kind was $8.
Still, after only a month in service since reopening, Baby Izakaya is already a stunningly fully-formed vision of a restaurant, with a finely honed devotion to finding new ways to be savory — the sort of place, in better times, you’d take guests from out of town. Though still technically a baby, Baby Izakaya seems all grown-up.