In December 2022, Tokyo welcomed a food-fashion mash-up as New York-based culinary collective Ghetto Gastro – which promises to bring ‘Bronx to the world, and the world to the Bronx’ – united with Japanese brand Sacai on an ephemeral restaurant, ‘Sacai Gastro’.
Housed in Tokyo Burnside, in the city’s Harajuku neighbourhood, the restaurant offered a menu that riffed on a Ghetto Gastro mainstay, the waffle – the collective sells its own ‘Wavy’ waffle and pancake mixes in an array of flavours – here shaped like the sole of a Nike shoe (Sacai is a longtime collaborator with the sportswear brand).
Ghetto Gastro unites with Sacai on capsule
Although the restaurant closed after a brief run, those who missed out are now able to buy into the project with a special capsule collection of clothing made in collaboration between Ghetto Gastro and Sacai creative director Chitose Abe. Originally designed as the staff uniform, the pieces draw on the ease of chef’s whites – an oversized T-shirt, wide-legged trousers, a wraparound apron – reimagined in a bold bandana print, a hallmark of Sacai’s own collections.
‘Besides loving the aesthetic of the manner in which Chitose fashions the Sacai bandana garments, bandanas have deep cultural resonance and range from Bronx gangs in the 1970s to the blue-collar labourers,’ say Ghetto Gastro. ‘As the Black power kitchen, it’s only right we rock the black paisley.’
Ghetto Gastro was founded in 2012 by chefs Pierre Serrao, Lester Walker and Malcolm Livingston II, alongside CEO Jon Gray, the last serving as a judge for the Wallpaper* Design Awards in 2022 (Livingston II is no longer part of the collective). Working at the intersection of food and culture, the collective say they use their work to tell stories about ‘where we come from and the cultures that inspire us, generating excitement by merging the cooking traditions of Black, brown, and Asian folks’. Previous collaborations include Cartier, Serpentine Galleries and Crux.
‘What I love about what we’ve been able to build is the respect and adoration for what we do, which is very Black,’ Gray told Wallpaper’s Pei-Ru Keh in 2022. ‘[We’ve] been able to put a premium on Blackness, especially in this vernacular that we have that’s really coming from being a product of divested communities.’
Abe, meanwhile, founded Sacai in 1999, and alongside her collections has been a prolific collaborator, uniting with Nike, Beats by Dre and Cartier, among others. She calls her approach a ‘melting pot’, a slogan which appeared across her A/W 2019 collection.
This latest collaboration will be available exclusively on Sacai and Ghetto Gastro’s websites, as well as Sacai Aoyama store and Dover Street Market New York, from today (28 April 2023).
