The best new dining experience in Oklahoma requires you to sit at a table with strangers in an old house off of Classen and eat a bunch of food you didn’t order. It is spectacular.
Nani has everything I never knew I wanted in a restaurant. I suffer from a rare and challenging disease called Bad at Ordering Food, which mostly affects young, privileged white girls. It causes me to order the worst thing on the menu and everyone else dining with me to order the best thing on the menu. Nani has solved this for me. You will not order anything while eating there. In fact, if you don’t even want to speak to another human throughout the whole dinner then you don’t have to. But you should talk to all the dudes because they love what are doing and want to talk to you about it, as they will let you know this meal is intended to be a dialogue, not a monologue.
Incorporating both Japanese and Choctaw cuisines, the Oklahoma City establishment creates a set menu for each of their dinners that changes with the seasons. The young, adventurous and, let’s be real, attractive men running this joint are beyond passionate about what they are doing. Eating at Nani feels a little bit like seeing your friend’s band for the first time and realizing that he will not be selling you weed for much longer. Boy’s got a future.
My latest Nani experience was one of their vegan dinners that that they do about once a month. There were about a million courses, starting with herbal tea and ending with coffee service. The courses are tiny little dudes, maybe four bites of food at most, but the flavors are so intense and interesting that it’s all you need. Plus, you never have to unbutton your pants or take your decorative belt off of your dress. This is something I do at nearly every meal and always forget to put myself back together before I leave the table. RIP, dignity.
The presentation of the food is, in a word, Instagram-worthy. Every stupid picture of food you have subjected your followers to in the past is going to look like an actual pile of human feces compared to the majesty of these plates. Strangely though, a certain feeling comes over me when I eat there that just makes taking photos feel like it would cheapen the experience, or maybe the BYOB policy allowing me to be my own bartender results in me forgetting to take any pics.
This is the place you take a date to impress them, a friend to say how sorry you are about puking in her car, a parent to show that, yes, you are an adult now and can make a reservation on the internet. This local, sustainable, sexy-in-an-approachable-way food that will force you to realize that Oklahoma is a better place when we all stick around and do cool shit instead of running for the coasts.
Learn more about the bros of Nani here and make a reservation while you are there because it is the right thing to do.
