A First Look Inside Dr. Clark, the New Chinatown Restaurant With Interiors from Green River Project and Uniforms by Bode

With a newly-opened sake bar in the basement of the Essex Market, a sibling pair of Izakaya restaurants in lower Manhattan, and the Ridgewood venue Nowadays under his belt, restaurateur Yudai Kanayama has been busy for about a decade. And he’s showing no signs of slowing down: His latest endeavor, Dr. Clark, which will open on Sunday in the formerly beloved late-night karaoke spot Winnie’s (or, more recently, Lalito), is his “dream project”—one that required assembling the perfect team.

After a visit to the Bode store on Hester street late last year, Kanayama was struck by the precision of the space, from the architectural details to the color of the wood: “Everyone is using a natural plywood, and this was something different,” Kanayama says of the coffee-stained cabinet of curiosities. “No one else is doing anything like it.” And so he went about poaching the designer duo behind the store, Aaron Aujla and Benjamin Bloomstein of Green River Project LLC, hoping they could help him bring his vision to life—that of a nostalgic and inviting meeting place, evocative of home. Home, to Kanayama, is Hokkaido, the second largest island in Japan known for its jingisukan (or, Genghis Khan lamb BBQ) and robust agricultural history. Kanayama thinks jingisukan has more potential here, as “Japanese people don’t understand the flavor.” Beyond serving lamb barbecue (to be sourced from KinderHook farms in Upstate New York), Dr. Clark will also focus on specialty sea urchin that the chef, Mumetake Ogata, a former fisherman, is accustomed to catching himself off of the northernmost tip of Japan, as well as their signature late-night milk parfait (“Hokkaido’s drunk food,” Kanayama notes).

What began as Kanayama’s dream shifted quickly into the somewhat harsh reality of a one-month timeline for the Green River designers, a seemingly herculean task for a studio that fabricates everything from scratch. But with four days until opening night, the dark and intimate hide-out, soaked in Green River’s identifiable coffee-stain luan wood and stuffed full of their folk-inspired furniture, looked nearly complete, despite decorative debris covering every surface. “We had about four weeks to make 60 pieces of furniture,” says Aujla. This includes 14 hand-sewn African mahogany barstools, eight aluminum barbecue tables, and 25 linen-upholstered table stools. This excludes all of the decorative ornamentation: homemade aluminum sconces yet to be installed, a miniature clay sculpture of the famed Japanese agriculturist Dr. William C. Clark himself (a life-sized facsimile of which still stands in Hokkaido), a Kubrickian rectangular bar framed in soft light, and Japanese characters carved into the floor and onto the exterior that, when translated, relay small details about the restaurant (closing time, booth numbers, etc). “The best part is imbuing personality and biographical details into the space. The moment you can design something based on someone’s history or education, that’s when you start to have fun,” Aujla says.

As far as direction goes, Aujla and Bloomstein were given a lot of free rein. “I don’t care about function,” Kanayama says. “Function can be figured out later. I just told them to make it as cool as possible.” With hydrangeas hung upside down around the room, food to be served up (by staff donning sheepskin hats and work coats designed by Bode) until 11 p.m., umami soft-serve starting at 12 a.m., and a karaoke set-up to be used until closing, it would seem like the Dr. Clark team might succeed in imbuing (and restoring) form, function and fun.