TOKYO STORY

Greenpoint's upscale portal to Japan.

- HANNAH GOLDFIELD

About ten years ago, the concept of “Brooklyn” seemed to be trending in Tokyo. In 20%3, a chef named Makoto Asamoto opened a since shuttered) restaurant called Fort Greene, which joined the establishments Brooklyn Pancake House and Brooklyn Parlor on the menu: roast chicken, Brooklyn Session I.P.A.).The coffee label Brooklyn Roasting Company has set up locations in Tokyo, and a neighborhood called Daikanyama, a destination for brunch and vintage clothing, is sometimes referred to as Little Brooklyn. In the past few years, Brooklyn’s northernmost neighborhood, Greenpoint—once defined largely by its Polish and Puerto Rican populations; more recently, a relatively sleepy hipster hamlet—has seen a feedback loop emerge, with a wave of new Japanese businesses.

In the expansive dining room at the restaurant Rule of Thirds, panelled in blond wood and rimmed by sage-green velvet banquettes, you can order a gloriously puffy Aottokeki, or soufflé pancake, for brunch, or sake-steamed clams for dinner. ACRE, a restaurant and gift shop around the corner, offers bento boxes and housewares; the other day, I bought sachets filled with fragrant curls of hinoki, wood from a Japanese cypress, to make my closet smell like a spa, and a small sawashi, a scrubbing brush made from tightly wound palm fibres, as spiky as a hedgehog. Afterward, I wandered north to the tea shop Kettl, where I drank a fragrant cup of hojicha, roasted green tea, and ate an exceptional bar of matcha chocolate studded with crunchy toasted buckwheat, its sweet, intense grassiness cut through with a jolt of salt.