Take Me to Your Spot: Hamilton Leithauser @ Samurai Papa
The Walkmen frontman turned solo troubadour takes us out for his favorite ramen in the city
Welcome to Take Me to Your Spot, a series with a simple premise: food, a fascinating person, and the restaurant connecting them. In each installment, an interesting New Yorker (as well as folks from further afield) takes us to their favorite restaurant—a place where they rank as a true regular—and shows us the ropes.
“Y’all in a band?” a kid in his mid twenties asks me. “Because, like, you guys are all giving serious rockstar energy.”
“No,” I say, and flick my head to the right, toward the rangy, six-foot-four frontman slouched atop a swivel stool with his back to the bar, legs akimbo, our small crowd of dads gathered around him. He sports a stained seersucker blazer, an equally stained Lacoste golf shirt, and a pair of Ray Ban Aviators. His hair, a brown mop, is either rakish or disheveled, depending on where your tastes lie, and he sips what appears to be a mojito, although by this point I’ve long ago lost track of the drinks. “But he is,” I tell the kid.
It’s just after 5 p.m., a blustery Saturday in mid April, and we’re at King Tai, a bi-level bar in Crown Heights whose white and pink Art Deco exterior makes it stick out like some South Beach spot pulled from the pages of an Elmore Leonard paperback. The “rock star” in question is Hamilton Leithauser, lead singer of seminal indie band The Walkmen and one of our finest and most underrated troubadours.
It’s a rare afternoon of irresponsible day drinking. My kids are upstate with my wife. Hamilton’s 13-year-old daughter awaits his arrival back home, where he is due to host five of her friends for a sleepover birthday party. But for right now, it is as if we’re both 25 again. I take an internal beat, my bearings momentarily lost, and think: how’d I end up here?
For that we can blame Samurai Papa, a blink-and-you-miss-it cinder block establishment on Nostrand Avenue with graffiti tags that are in better shape than its dilapidated sign. This is Hamilton’s favorite neighborhood ramen joint, and where our day began some four hours prior.
“I come here minimum once a week,” Hamilton tells me from our perch in the far corner of the bar at this tiny, triangular-shaped spot. “My wife doesn’t eat ramen, so I usually come with my girls. My little one loves it. I’m like, ‘where do you want to go?’ And she’s like, ‘Samurai!’”
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Our starters arrive — pork and vegetable gyoza, one of each, plus edamame and a calamari salad. The beers we began with, crisp Sapporo drafts in metal cups that are cold to the touch, have evaporated by now, and Hamilton interrupts himself from one of his many stories (his feuds with the city’s Department of Buildings; how he pissed himself while buying his first Fender amp) to order another round.
“Could we also get the Ozeki Dry Sake?” he asks the woman behind the bar. “And two glasses. It’s not too sweet is it?” Hamilton turns to me. “When we [The Walkmen] went to Japan, I learned that drinking sake and beer together is the best combination of all.”
The Walkmen are a hard band to picture in Japan, despite having played the country several times. Hamilton confesses that they never had much of a Japanese fanbase, and yet bookers were eager to import them. It was the mid aughts after all, that “meet-me-in-the-bathroom” era when it felt like the revived New York City rock scene could conquer the world. The Strokes. Yeah Yeah Yeahs. LCD. You could perhaps mention The Walkmen in the same breath as those bands (they played Letterman six times, after all), and yet, to me at least, they seemed as if they belonged to this city alone. Blame it on the world weariness they exuded already at such a young age, typified by the refrain in breakout hit “The Rat” — “When I used to go out, I would know everyone that I saw; now I go out alone if I go out at all.” With its galloping drum beat and Hamilton’s primal howl, it was one of those unmistakable anthems played in every downtown bar. “We wrote it in, like, 10 minutes,” he says, “then spent seven months on the bridge.”
Hamilton also wrote the lyrics for “The Rat” in his head, which is how he composes all his tunes. Growing up in D.C., he attended the prestigious St. Albans prep school, where he met his future bandmates as well as his wife (she briefly dated him at 15, dumped him over the phone, only to reunite years later). Hamilton’s father was a painter by night and by day the chief of design at the National Gallery of Art. After dinner, Mr. Leithauser would disappear into his studio for the rest of the evening, and he passed this artistic obsessiveness down to his son.
“‘Get off the ward,’ my mother used to say to me, because by the time I started writing music, I was always staring off into space.” Hamilton laughs. “It’s probably not the most P.C. thing, but she meant ‘get off the lunatic ward.’”
It was at St. Alban’s where Hamilton also started taking Japanese (he wanted to be able to write the three types of Japanese characters, he tells me while admiring the label on our can of sake). Hamilton would study the language for a total of six years, and while he’s modest about his ability to speak it (“I can say hello and goodbye now – such a colossal waste of time”), his pronunciation sounds pretty good to me when he orders our ramen. “Two Tonbara Tonkotsu ramen, please.”
“I would hold this place high, worldwide,” he says. “My band, not The Walkmen, my solo band, we find the best ramen place in every city we go to. The best one we’ve ever had was in Vancouver.” Hamilton takes a beat. “But Samurai is amazing. There are really popular places in Manhattan that aren't as good as this.”
Our ramen confirms this claim. We tuck into steaming bowls of noodles and milky broth, talk through mouthfuls of pork. Hamilton instructs me on the spices, praises the umami of it all. “It’s, you know, there's like this sweet, sour, bitter, salty, savory taste.” He takes a long gulp of his Sapporo. “Man, days like today are just the best days to eat ramen.” I agree, cold beer and hot ramen is, at least in this moment, the best thing ever.
We order more beers, talk more music. Randy Newman. Warren Zevon. Sinatra’s late career renaissance. Jim Morrison, who Hamilton will never forgive Oliver Stone for turning into a “buffoon.” And, of course, Dylan, the musician Hamilton is most often compared to, and sometimes not in the best of lights. He takes it all in stride. Hamilton’s is a career most singer-songwriters would kill for. Best New Music accolades from Pitchfork. A two-week residency at Café Carlyle every spring (plus an upstairs suite for the duration). A-list fans turned friends like Sienna Miller and Ethan Hawke, plus the admiration of strangers, who still approach him on the street.
“Do you ever get recognized here?” I ask, looking around at the now half-full restaurant.
“No, never,” Hamilton says, and laughs in relief.
We talk more contemporary stuff, too. TikTok and Taylor Swift. Vampire Weekend, whose frontman Ezra Koenig once interned for The Walkmen at their studio in Harlem. Oh, and SZA, who Hamilton’s eldest daughter introduced him to.
“I think SZA is a genius,” he says. “I wish I could sing on her next record.”
The bill comes and soon after we boogie, back out into the wind whipping along Nostrand Avenue. Having done enough of these profiles by now, usually I’m ready for things to wrap — you can only talk to a stranger for so long.
But today I find myself lingering on the sidewalk. Perhaps it’s the nostalgia factor that, much like food and restaurants, music delivers so perfectly. I remember all the times I pumped jukeboxes full of quarters to blare The Walkmen in the bars of my youth, or how many nights I stumbled home through the East Village with “The Rat” pouring out of the headphones belonging to my second gen iPod. Maybe it’s just the beer in my belly, commingling with the heat of the ramen, or the dizziness I still feel from that sake we probably shouldn’t have ordered. Hamilton’s got a birthday party full of tween girls to host, and I should probably get home, too. As the cliche goes: we’re not kids anymore. And so I pull out my phone, ready to get an Uber.
“Hey,” Hamilton says. “My buddy’s got a bar not far from here. Wanna go? He’ll open it early for us. It’s my other favorite spot.”
James Jung
VP, Content
Blackbird Labs, Inc.
His favorite has to be Ramen Danbo in Vancouver...everything else pales in comparison.