In May, in a city north of Tokyo, a man held up a 7-Eleven. His weapon: knives. His score: three rice balls.
Ten million rice balls are sold in Japan each day, according to the Japan Consumer Marketing Research Institute. They are small, on the scale of tea scones, and at their most basic are made of little more than rice and salt, tucked into a sleeve of nori. They are the equivalent of bologna on white bread to Americans: a nation’s collective memory of school lunch. They wait on the shelves of Japan’s convenience stores, like meat pies in Australia and jars of pickled eggs down South, nostalgic and stolid, almost beyond judgment.
At Hanamizuki, which opened on the northeastern edge of Chelsea in May, the rice balls (onigiri or omusubi in Japanese) are still humble, but slightly offbeat, as if sprung from a Haruki Murakami novel. A version called the Italian looks and tastes wholly Japanese, with stray ticks of salt and vinegar, but it’s been infiltrated with salami, olives and capers.
Elsewhere, there is bacon afloat in miso soup, wreathed by shredded romaine and tomatoes half-shriveled and hyper-sweet. In another soup bowl, the interlopers are gnocchi, made with tofu and glutinous rice flour, so they have bounce and squeak under the teeth.
The menu is designed for snacking, with 10 kinds of omusubi — made with short-grain rice that clings but doesn’t clump — and four variations on miso soup, served in dainty bowls. (You choose the rice balls from a glass case, where they are kept in plastic wrap and restocked throughout the day.)
For the recipes, Jumi Fujiwara, the owner and a native of Osaka, consulted with Kiyotaka Shinoki, the chef of Bohemian, a kakurega (speakeasy) restaurant behind a Japanese butcher shop in NoHo, where reservations are by referral only. (Ms. Fujiwara also runs a half-hidden laser hair-removal salon that can be entered only via the cafe.)
The rosy square of Spam bound by nori to a bed of rice: that’s authentic, a Hawaiian innovation from the 1980s. Here the meat has been doused with teriyaki sauce and the rice flecked with sun-dried tomato and ichimi togarashi, ground red chile. It’s fancier than the ones sold at gas stations in Honolulu, but it’s still the Spam that makes it delicious.
Most of the omusubi at Hanamizuki are prepared maze-gohan style, with ingredients minced and mixed throughout the rice. The best comes with okaka, bonito flakes boosted with soy sauce, seaweed and shiitake mushrooms, ingredients rich in that elusive flavor termed umami, suggestive of centuries spent beneath the sea.
Unagi escapes the usual lash of sweet sauce inflicted on it in sushi, and takes on an almost lemony note in proximity to sansho pepper berries stewed in sugar, soy and mirin. The rice is sealed with a bamboo leaf, which is decoration only. (Unless you’re a panda.)
Ground beef is tumbled over sushi rice, vinegary and sweet, in a pouch of deep-fried tofu skin; nubs of gari, Japanese ginger, accentuate the sweetness. Wakame seaweed is cut with hot pink eggplant pickled in purple shiso. Two kinds of plum, unripened aoume and koume (smaller, more sour and crunchy), are pickled until almost unbearably, wonderfully tart.
Among the miso soups, the B.L.T. is an unexpected success, with its kisses of salt and sugar. But Tofu & Tofu, whose name evokes a wayward detective agency, puzzles with its pairing of tofu soft and deep-fried; the latter merely disintegrates.
It is lovely to watch the afternoon dwindle in Hanamizuki’s soaring room, white on all sides and lit by orbs covered in feathers. Up front, two trees tilt from white concrete pots. The walls are a kind of vertical garden, with chalk sketches of heads pompadoured in moss and red leaves arranged into giant lips, “True Love” written across the teeth.
These are the work of Satoshi Kawamoto, who is also responsible for the mantras in old-timey script. “Take a bite of beauty,” the wall says. Perhaps a chiffon roll cake, then, trucked in from Patisserie Tomoko in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and so precisely curved with its inner swirl of cream that it looks grown, not baked. It is almost all air, almost too sweet, and perfect.