To call Kiki Kudo a jack of all trades feels like an understatement. Born in Yokohama, a city that sits on the Tokyo Bay, Kudo was already an accomplished writer before she moved to New York City 7 years ago on a journalist visa. She had studied oil painting at art school for a while before quickly realizing it wasn’t her thing, and then devoted herself to writing, contributing to fashion and culture magazines like Brutus. She also wrote two novels, one a sort of meta-fiction book in the style of Kathy Acker, and the other was more straightforward art criticism. She started going out in Tokyo too, getting immersed in the city’s thriving club scene, but it wasn’t until she moved to New York in 2011 that she started to DJ, produce music, and cook, all of which she’s creatively focused on at the moment.
Kudo had a DJ residency at Lower East Side institution Pianos for a while, and two years ago she started to teach herself how to produce (she shows me all of the KORG software that she uses on her computer while we chat in Dimes Deli). Her delightfully wonky debut EP, Splashing, came out on Brooklyn-based label Incienso last year, and Kudo’s characterization of it gives some insight into her varied audio-gastronomic palate; she calls it: “Nanotech Pop, Synth Jams, Kitchen Wave, and Listening Techno.”
If you live in New York City, and if you’ve ever traversed the small triangle on the Lower East Side colloquially known as Dimes Square in the past couple years, chances are you might have run into the hip spot’s small offshoot to pick up one of the neatly packed bento jars they used to sell. Those were Kudo’s creations, called Chiso, which she had been making since 2014. She didn’t cook much back in Tokyo, where so much fresh, quick food was available even at the local corner store, but once she moved to New York she started experimenting with the simple recipes that have become her signature. The Chiso jars were as eye-catching as they were tasty: inspired by ozhizushi, or Japanese pressed sushi (it’s usually a block of rice that’s made from forming the sushi in a wooden mold), they were all-natural, vegan layers of rice, vegetables, and even fruit. The classic one stacked rice, carrot and ginger kinpira, grilled zucchini, and fresh ginger, while the yellow version (each layer is a uniform sunny shade) combined saffron rice, yellow pepper pickles, coconut butter corn rice, yellow squash, and turmeric hummus, which she topped off with a peach and pear salad.
Kudo recently moved on from making Chiso, but this auspicious culinary debut has led to similarly unconventional cooking opportunities. The regular practice of making dinner for her husband and friends eventually expanded to a full-on dinner series. Kudo insists that the larger scale of this operation isn’t so difficult. “I can easily make a meal for two, and multiplying for four, or six, or more isn’t that hard,” she says. Vogue covered the first of these large-scale dinner events last year, which served as a space for musicians and artists to meet, test new material (there were open decks at one point), and foster future collaborations. Kudo cooked for the couple dozen artists in the small kitchen of the Chinatown loft space that served as the venue; she prepared a five course meal comprised of cold tomato ramen, an artichoke rice ball with grilled tahini miso, and shiitake bacon, which is quickly becoming one of her signatures. “The mushrooms really do taste like bacon,” she tells me.
Aside from these dinner parties, Kudo’s working on a cookbook, which she hopes to finish up this year. She gives me a sneak peek of some of the recipes, which include one of her favorite original creations, a Pineapple Gazpacho that Dimes sold last summer. It’s taking her longer to write than she expected given the fact that English isn’t her native tongue, but it’s precisely this language barrier that’s driven her to improve on her cooking and her music. “Music is so easy to receive and to communicate. It’s very natural—just to try to make somebody dance.” And in the same manner, figuring out what someone likes to eat is a way to better understand them. “Everybody has a favorite, their own comfort flavors, so learning like that motivates me to make better food,” Kudo says. To put it simply: “Food is a very easy way to communicate with people.” In Kudo’s wacky world, which you can catch a glimpse of above, she’s connecting with people one dish, and song, at a time.