When and where will Snow Crane land?

 Esteemed local chef plans to bring minimalist Japanese ice cream to Hyattsville area

By GRIFFIN LIMERICK

When asked about his favorite flavor of ice cream, Hyattsville-based chef Takeshi Nishikawa needs a minute to think. 

There’s pistachio. The rum raisin that his father favored. 

“But if I don’t say vanilla, I’d probably be lying to myself,” Nishikawa laughs.

He’s a purist, a man of distilled tastes, with a penchant for minimalism. But minimalist does not mean unsophisticated.

Nishikawa’s new high-concept ice cream shop Snow Crane, which he hopes to bring to the Hyattsville area in spring 2025, will feature flavors like genmaicha, black and white sesame, and miso, whose sweet and savory profile he compares to salted caramel. There will be flavors of flan, tofu and sweet red beans (adzuki). 

“Maybe even just straight up rice,” Nishikawa says. “Something like that could be fun.”

Nishikawa’s unconventional approach derives, in part, from his experience in fine dining. He has worked as a chef in restaurants around the DMV rhomboid for nearly two decades now, in kitchens ranging from the Ritz-Carlton in Tysons Corner to Lincoln in Logan Circle, experimenting with flavor combinations that challenge a community, which, he says, has “a very sophisticated palate.”

The other inspiration, fittingly, is his culture.

Nishikawa grew up in western Japan, in the city of Suzuka, famous for its Formula 1 circuit. From his childhood home, Nishikawa could hear the sound of car engines boasting at the nearby track. His father was a mechanical engineer for Honda. Hands-on work ran in the family. 

“I don’t have anybody who’s a lawyer, a doctor,” he explains.

From his mother’s side of the family, Nishikawa learned to cook. He calls himself one of those lucky people who figured out what they want to do early in life. His grandmother, who he names as his primary influence, made dinner each night while his parents were at work. Nishikawa worked by her side in the kitchen, cutting vegetables, stirring stews. One of his earliest memories is of slicing his finger off while chopping an apple, having it reattached at the hospital.

Together, Nishikawa and his grandmother made straightforward meals. Roasted fish. Stewed potatoes. Nothing fancy, nothing glamorous, he says. Very simple, very comforting.

Nishikawa learned to refine these principles of simplicity in his nascent career as a chef in Japan.

“When you have 153 ingredients, you can use semi-OK ingredients and get away with it,” Nishikawa explains. But in Japanese food, “You use the highest quality product for everything. And you don’t hide behind anything.”

He offers the standard example of sushi — rice, soy, wasabi, fish.

“Every component has a 25% rating, so if one thing’s off, you’re way off. That’s why I tend to focus on simplicity, on a more minimalistic approach. To me, there’s no other way to do it.”

With Snow Crane, Nishikawa says he wants to introduce new flavors and cultures to the Hyattsville community. The menu will be rotating, with an emphasis on smaller, seasonal ingredients, including Japanese fruits, which Nishikawa calls some of the best in the world.

Scrolling through a Google Doc, he names white strawberries; sweet potatoes; citrus fruits like yuzu and sudachi — flavoring agents in Japan, akin to lemons and limes; Okinawa mangoes; Hokkaido melons.

He cuts himself off.

“When I was brainstorming for product ideas, my keyboard literally never stopped,” he says.

Japanese ice cream, according to Nishikawa, is lighter than its American counterpart, leaning more toward gelato. Twenty percent fat, Nishikawa says, is too excessive for him.

“If you kill someone because of your product, you’re not going to have a returning customer, right?”

In general, he is a health-conscious guy. Nishikawa doesn’t consume a lot of meat. He mostly refrains from eating dairy and sugar (“That’s a pretty funny one,” he remarks). He often bikes to work in Capitol Hill, where he serves as culinary director of Rose’s Restaurant Group — the fine dining-catering amalgam that includes the Michelin-starred Rose’s Luxury and the two Michelin-starred Pineapple and Pearls, which Nishikawa helped found two years ago “from zero.” 

Around Hyattsville, he takes walks with his wife and 1-year-old daughter — through the neighborhood to Vigilante Coffee Company, along the Trolley Trail to Manifest Bread. As they stroll, they note what the area specializes in — taquerias, Salvadoran food. Mainly, they look for what isn’t there.

“My wife and I are always joking around: ‘What are some of the things that you wish were here that would make the neighborhood better? The city better?’”

It was during one of these mobile brainstorming sessions that Nishikawa conceived of Snow Crane. Although his experience with ice cream has been limited to small-batch experiments in fine dining kitchens, Nishikawa says he understands the science of ice cream, what he refers to as its “essence” — the crystals and fat. 

“What I don’t have experience at is high volume, a much larger scale,” he says. “But it’s not like I’m trying to create a particle accelerator in the backyard. I think I can figure it out.”

Snow Crane will reflect his fine dining bonafides only in the quality of its product, according to Nishikawa. He doesn’t have a price point yet, but he says it will be something like the cost of dessert at a restaurant, whatever enables him to use premium ingredients and pay his employees not only fairly, “but actually well.”

“If random foodies from the District want to come, please, we can have a $40 ice cream,” Nishikawa says. “But the baseline is going to be something great, something affordable, something delicious, something pure, something simple.”

He is adamant that the Michelin stars in his Capitol Hill orbit will have no bearing on Snow Crane. His stated goal is to bring value and add quality of life to the people who live in Hyattsville.

“Everything else is secondary,” he says. “I don’t need any accreditations, certifications. None of that [stuff’s] going to be on the wall. Except for the health certification. For obvious reasons.”

Nishikawa hasn’t chosen a storefront yet, but says the City of Hyattsville has been incredibly generous in helping him land a commercial space. He’s aiming for the Arts District, “so families can walk to it after dinner at 2Fifty [Texas BBQ].” 

Until then, Nishikawa reveals that he has been given the green light to operate a pop-up at Vigilante — whose coffee he calls “incredible” — and a stall at the Gateway Farmers Market in Mount Rainier.

The Snow Crane storefront, however, remains at the whim of the less glamorous aspects of restauranting: permitting, rent, construction and — before all these — alighting on a location.

“If the world was mine, and everything was exactly as I wished, I would time the opening with spring 2024, when all the cherry blossoms start up in the District,” Nishikawa says. “That would be the perfect scenario.”