Kelseay Dukae, the owner and chef at Kinoko, Greenpoint's new Cajun-flavored Asian spot, has been dreaming sushi for years.
As a white woman originally from New Orleans, Dukae isn’t exactly who you’d expect to be serving sushi. Despite this, and that fact she's not Japanese, Dukae has been working in sushi restaurants since she was 14.
When she was younger, Dukae said she fell in love with the cuisine and lied about her age in order to get her first job at her local sushi restaurant. When her bosses found out two months later that she was just turning 15, she was already too integral to the staff to be fired over her fib.
She originally took the job because she wanted to learn how to make sushi, but Dukae felt confined to front-of-house positions.
“It was kind of hard to break through, especially in the South,” she told BK Reader. “They gave me a lesson here and there, I'd be able to jump on the line when it was slow, but they weren't really trying to have my little white girl, 17-year-old ass on the sushi line, you know. Even though it was only 15 years ago, it was much more crazy of an idea than it is now.”
Now with her own place, Dukae recently flitted around her new restaurant excitedly, calling everyone who entered the establishment "boo" and laughing hard, with half her sentences punctuated by a self-deprecating snore.
She greeted one customer wearing Tulane University gear with "Roll waves! Represent, mama,” and then served up a tray of shrimp and crawfish dumplings to the table, saying, "Alright babies, one more dumps!”
Over the course of ten years working around sushi, Dukae figured out how to teach herself the craft. She knew that during traditional sushi apprenticeships, students spend the entire first year perfecting rice — so she took it upon herself to save money and do the same thing from home.
"I kind of went to YouTube university for this, and figured out a lot by myself," Dukae explained. "For a whole year, I was making at least one or two batches of rice every day. I took some weekends off here and there, but I was doing it for pretty much a full year until I perfected rice enough that I felt like I could sell it — until I felt like, 'I can do popups and be proud of this.'”
She first started experimenting with vegan sushi in pop-up form when she lived in California, after her stint as a MasterChef participant. Next, she moved back to New Orleans and folded Cajun flavor into her menu. Finally, she arrived in NYC and started showcasing her plant-forward sushi at Smorgasburg under the name Kinoko, which means "mushroom" in English.
"You know, it was mushrooms that I relied on to make it really meaty for vegans — the different textures, different umamis that come from that," Dukae said.
Kinoko has fish offerings, but the vegan hand rolls are still the star of the show. The farm temakis, reasonably priced at $6–7, are Dukae's oldest recipes. The panko-fried oyster mushroom temaki is the best demonstration of how Kinoko delivers on its name — these mushrooms are freshly fried, which makes for a crispy, warm and somewhat meaty bite, with sour, creamy yuzu mayo drizzled daintily on top.
Another highlight is the jackfruit sneauxcrab (read: faux-snow-crab) temaki, which Dukae designed to mimic the taste of imitation crab meat. This temaki is prepared as if it were a crunchy roll: Dukae slides in some slivers of cucumber, and tops it with tenkasu flakes and chives to add more texture.
She is proud of how much the effect mimics real crab meat.
"That one's really fun because I've had — especially at Smor[gasburg], because obviously I've had a lot more time there — I've had a lot of vegans come to me and be like, 'I think you gave me the wrong roll,'" she said. "They were confused. And I was like, 'No, that's for you, boo!'"
Dukae's mother, who is Cajun and whose gumbo has won two regional competitions, is a big inspiration for the current iteration of Kinoko's menu.
“One of our dishes is gumbo ramen,” Dukae explained. “She's like the gumbo, I'm like the ramen. This Japanese-Cajun-ish take on it is the melding of our worlds together.”
Dukae originally aimed to open Kinoko in July, but renovations took much longer than expected. With the windows finally finished and the DIY stools with groovy-patterned coverings in place, Dukae is ready to prop open the door and welcome in all her new boos.
Kinoko is located at 179 Meserole Ave and is open Tues–Sun, 5–10pm.
