A musician's approach to running a restaurant

Walk into Warude on a weekday afternoon and you're already inside Yuichi Iida's world. There's a Japanese-Mexican fusion menu on the wall, world roots music playing through the speakers, and on the TV in the corner there's a good chance you'll catch footage of African djembe drums being played somewhere far from Brooklyn. The room isn't styled to feel a certain way. It's an extension of Yuichi's actual life as a percussionist, a traveler, and a founder who built a menu by tracing how cultures have shaped each other's food across borders.

Yuichi and his wife Hiroko opened Warude in Bed-Stuy in 2018 with no restaurant experience. By 2020 they were navigating the pandemic, and a few years later they opened a second location in Crown Heights when their original block grew crowded with new restaurants. Construction outside the new location brought years of dust, noise, and lost foot traffic before they could establish it. They're still here, both locations open, and Warude has become a fixture of the Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights food scenes.

When indoor dining shut down in 2020, Yuichi built an outdoor pickup setup, reorganized service for a takeout volume that hadn't existed before, and called his musician friends, many of whom had lost their gigs. They came and played on the patio. Customers came to listen and stayed for the food. The musicians weren't strangers recruited for the moment; they were people from Yuichi's musical life, which has included decades of percussion work and his eight-piece world roots band Brown Rice Family.

Crown Heights tested them differently. There was no live music answer to a multi-year construction project on the sidewalk. The outdoor space was unusable, which delayed the dining area they'd planned. Yuichi was lighthearted about it when we talked, but they waited it out and added the dining area when the space outside finally opened up.

Yuichi's humility is the through-line. He doesn't describe COVID or the construction as battles he won, just conditions he was operating in. The musicians weren't a clever pivot, they were friends. The patience through Crown Heights wasn't strategy, it was what the situation required. Warude itself isn't a concept he's pitching, it's a place he's been building for almost a decade out of his actual life.

Walk in, eat a bowl, listen to the music. The room tells you everything.

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Yuichi Iida is the co-founder of Warude in Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights, Brooklyn.