This week’s local chef interview was with Alex Dakers, the mastermind behind Yabai Nikkei, a Japanese-American food cart that focuses on using local, fresh ingredients to create simple, yet delicious dishes. The word nikkei is a term used to describe the people, culture, and food of the Japanese diaspora. Alex sources a lot of the ingredients he uses for the food cart directly from the farmers market!
Alex started shopping at the market as a kid because his mom was a vegetarian and loved getting local, fresh produce. Food was a big priority in his family. Growing up, he ate a lot of Japanese food as his great-grandmother was an intensive farmer who fed the mouths of her local community post-war in Japan. His travels later on in his life and his most recent stay in Peru heightened his passion for cuisine that focuses on local ingredients and fueled his vision for Yabai Nikkei.
“I started to fall more and more in love with taking simple ingredients and making it into something for people to enjoy,” he says.
Alex is a regular at the market as he finds the location very convenient and loves to support the local farms. He enjoys running into people and learning what’s coming up for the season. When the market is not open, he still finds a way to source local ingredients as best he can while farmers are taking their much needed break through the winter.
“You don’t get bored when working with local ingredients because you move with the seasons. Nikkei cuisine is about not having exactly what you are looking for at first and finding something that works,” he says.
One of the seasonal ingredients he looks forward to seeing at the market is green garlic! It’s a great substitute for Nira (garlic chives), which is commonly used in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cooking. He uses it at the food cart for their Japanese caesar and their egg salad sando. Mizuna is by far his favorite salad green that he gets excited about whenever it is available at the market.
His go-to farms for sourcing ingredients include Wild Child, Upriver, and Fair Valley. This month Alex catered the farmers market’s annual member meeting that was attended by LCFM vendors and staff. He was thrilled to cook for our local farmers and honor all the hard work they have put into producing high-quality ingredients.
Alex shares with us some wisdom when shopping at the market, “Make sure to unbunch all your stuff!” Bunching is an effective tool for farmers to sell veggies in the appropriate quantities. If you don’t unbunch your veggies, it can break the stalks so they can’t soak up any water. This will help keep them alive and fresh as long as possible.
Come check out Yabai Nikkei at Coldfire brewery from Fridays – Sundays (noon – 8:00pm) or Mondays and Tuesdays (4:00 – 8:00pm). Alex is also the head chef at Junglefowl (formerly known as Izakaya Meiji)!