About three years ago, a spot called Dashi Okume opened in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It was a place that aimed to be the only custom-made dashi place in New York City, if not the U.S. Okume is originally a dry goods wholesaler at the Tokyo Central Wholesale Market; it was founded in 1971, so it has a long history of creating “delicious food forever.” Okume has a restaurant component, as well as multiple Japanese-owned businesses in a large, warehouse-like shared space. Japanese toasters and electronics, ceramics, and skin/haircare are here. You can even buy fancy (and insanely sharp!) Japanese knives here. I’d been wanting to come here for a while, but I finally made it here yesterday after some time with Kaia at Space Club and lunch at Wen Wen.

As soon as we walked into Dashi Okume, I felt a bit intimidated. You see bins and bins of different dried fish and seafood, multiple varieties of kelp/kombu/seaweed, dried vegetables, and mushrooms. By weight, you have an assistant help you select which ones you want for your custom dashi, and once you are done, they take all the dried pieces into a combined basket and dump it all into this huge, industrial-sized grinder. It shreds everything into small pieces, then portions out your dried dashi into 15 or 30 different perfectly portioned bags. Each bag yields about 300ml of “first dashi” stock, which you can then reboil and make second or third dashi if you so wish for a slightly more diluted dashi.

I couldn’t really deal with this during my first visit; it seemed like too much to choose with not enough background on proportions for dashi creation. I am no Japanese food or dashi expert. So, instead, I went to sip tastes of their already-created dashi. They had about five different types. You can self serve samples, all piping hot. Who would not enjoy having free tastes of fancy, ready-made dashi?! Even if you didn’t care to cook, the taste testing here would be fun and delicious. Predictably, I ended up getting a pack of 15 bags of their premium dashi, which was very seafoody, umami, and potent.

New York City is a hard place to get bored in. It seems like every neighborhood has something fun like this to discover. I love finding and enjoying new things and places in my adopted home.