Menkoi Sao: Warm Broth for The People Pleaser
If I have to baptize uncommunicative messy Brooklyn Gays in ceramic bowls of delicious ramen, I’ll indulge in that ritual, no questions asked.
I need to warn you. There is a breed of funny, esoterically tattooed non-binary dork—new to Brooklyn who will break your heart and apologize very sincerely for it later. I’ve met many and befriended three. All of those relationships either ended or changed over a bowl of ramen.
Let me set the stage:
It’s a wet-bulb summer evening. I’m fresh off a nine-hour office shift, and I’ve been lured into the chasms of The Highline. My friend River is trying to apologize while I am trying to find Menkoi Sao, a hole-in-the-wall ramen spot that a friend described as ‘a balm for the soul’.
In the unrelenting suffocation of my cacophonous childhood, I developed my incredible sense of humor… and my capacity for endurance.
I was sneaky, talented, bullied relentlessly, and deeply sensitive, so concerning what I like to call Circumstantial Pain Tolerance — mine is pretty high.
Our friend group at the time had lynch pins, pawns, collateral, and a covert narcissist. From the perspectives of the three I’d grown closest to, I was the collateral.
River and I, here and now, had reached the consequence, but not quite yet the exit point of a tide of entangled multi-party discommunication. Hurt feelings, and mic-dropping phone calls, crash outs, polycules, undercover cops, and a leatherclad dominatrix or two (or five), lions, tigers, bears and explosions, implosions, death by stereo…There’s a saying in some circles about not playing above your skill level. Though I’m often an island, I’ve come to include emotionally communicative skill levels in this sentiment.
People-pleasing is never about others, and if, in your version, you omit information from folks whose proximity and openness depend on your honesty. Well, they’re entitled to their reactions.
I’m no one’s fool, and I’m certainly not one to look stupid for believing genuinely that adults whose collective ethics place communication as a foundation would (perish the thought) talk to each other.
My belief in a friend’s capacity to resolve conflict from an honest space is not naivety, so much as a prerequisite for availability to me. I have low tolerance for emotional violence. I’m incredibly upfront about my aversion to mess, and I always, always have more interesting things to do. In the intimate procedure of another’s self-wreckage, I have been an afterthought. Sure, the cloying stench of their remorse is as inevitable as their apologies are inadequate. But before all that… is the soup.
River is a 6’3 floppy-haired, inked-up golden retriever gym rat with a superhero voice and, yes, more insecurities than sense at the moment, but they’re not secretly evil, despite the convoluted domino effect of their omission. They are, despite the knot in my chest, so pretty and so earnest.
And I am so excited about this fucking restaurant.
I didn’t need a heartfelt apology for being positioned as a breakable vase along a hero’s journey (turns out you can be fridged without a cis male protagonist around). I needed the vegetarian miso ramen from Menkoi Sato- details be damned (read: we didn’t have the address, it wasn’t showing up on Google Maps, and we were nowhere near the neighborhood).
Our last phone call, several months prior, had been dramatic, sure, but heartfelt and concluded amicably, though a crack in the handmade ceramic had been established.
So when I gathered, from hitched breath and nervous, self-steeling posture, that our talk would be a long one, I looked River dead in the eyes, smiled brightly, and told them straight up, “Stop talking till we hunt down this restaurant.”
If I was going to deal with messy nonsense, I knew I needed some soup, goddammit.
Menkoi Sao is intimate, lively, and lined with low wooden benches and tables. The air bursts with savory aromas. The sounds of staff speaking to each other and fellow patrons spilling tea or winding down after work allow you to sink into your geek-memorabilia-adorned environment. The space offers a low-urgency invitation to settle.
Sitting down, I’m unbothered. We continue with running bits and small talk. I sense their anticipation and insist we wait for our orders before things get emotional.
Good food can take the heat out of a conversation, and Menkoi Sato has the best ramen I’ve ever had.
Their miso ramen is indulgent. The earthy, fatty, saturated thickness of the broth– noodles bright and absorbent, movement fluid as ink in water;
The corn was piled high, glistening like ripe chrysanthemums, and the chopped scallions and garlic, like gleaming opal alongside menma, and a soft bite of sautéed cabbage nestled into a salt-fat balance that lures water into your mouth and caresses the tongue in a hedonistic bliss.
It liquidates the bones and lets everything- the kii, the venting, and in my case, the hurt and agitation flow freely.
There are, of course, layers to just how bothered one may find themself in a situation like Ramengate. I survived three such occasions last year with varying levels of upset. I’ve observed a measurable correlation between degrees of emotional devastation and the number of slurps-slurped throughout the sit-down.
In a chart or graph, this might look like a connected scatter plot. Imagine a clearly visible trend where the closer to “Very Bothered” I get, the more frequent and emotionally dependent the Slurps get. The metric for Units of Bother is measured via heart palpitations, forehead veins, molar grinding, and silent eye twitches; each outward display counts as one “Bothered” unit, with 20 units being “Very Bothered”.
I wonder, retrospectively, if during that sting of bittersweet conversation, I wasn’t after the safety net of loving broth. If I, instead, needed to be enveloped by something that didn’t burn in the first place.
A pitiful imitation to what we’d actually tried: uncomplicated connection; two seats in an infinite space, the chef’s hands in full view and the A.C. so high it made their quiet, unstuttered admissions easier to swallow; some good before we departed with new boundaries, and an impenetrable wall I created to stop this soft tongued golden retriever from scraping up the plastic on the thrifted sofa of my insides.
I’ve been the curator of elaborate chosen-family meals serving small peace. I didn’t have that to give to River. But I was trying, in my own way, to say, “Here. Look. I can give you this glimmering shred of calm– of quiet, bubbled warmth.” I was trying to say, “It will make you safe for a moment and salve the sting. Keep this with you, and I hope, even while you break my heart, you learn to give love to someone else as I do when they need it.”
River and I are still friends; we’re meeting up for lunch next week. I haven’t been back to Menkoi Sao, but I hope to return soon. If only to reclaim some of that warmth I try to give to others for myself. And I hope to see you similarly exhumed next time I stop by.
Eliot Parker Graves
Eliot Parker Graves (they/them), a Black writer, musician, and influencer from New York City, demystifies identity, love, and hunger through language and rhythm.
Their poems have appeared in Rookie Magazine, Soup Can Magazine, and Bicycle Comics’ In Absentia (2020). They are a Metropolitan Museum of Art ‘Kongo: Power and Majesty’ Poet-In-Residence (2015), Winter Tangerine ‘Open by Riot Laughter’ workshop alum (2017), a three-time Burrowing Artists Playwriting Fellow (2020-2022), and an Emotional Historians workshop participant (2022). Notably, Graves has read at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Apollo Theater, and The Kennedy Memorial Center, among others.
Graves is currently completing their debut EP.
Their free time is spent reading transformative fiction, playing Blues and Punk Rock, spoiling dogs and admiring the Moon.