International travel, though a rich opportunity to take in new sights, smells and sounds while meeting people from different walks of life, can be out of reach for many. But if Japan has been on your bucket list, and you haven’t been able to make the trip, the Trap Sushi parties at Monday Night Garage might fulfill that travel itch.
The bi-monthly event includes DJs, dancing, made-to-order sushi, cosplay competitions, and anime projected onto the walls. Musical artist Troop Brand and his wife Stephanie Lindo are the creators of Trap Sushi, and they joined “City Lights” senior producer Kim Drobes via Zoom to talk about their transportive new venture.
Interview highlights:
How Troop first fell in love with all things Japan:
“It started when I was in middle school, and my mom took me to this thrift store. And on one of the shelves, there was a Japanese manga… the first issue of ‘Naruto,'” said Brand. “When I read it, I was just so captured with it, and it was so different from anything I’ve ever seen. And I was like, ‘Yo, I really like this,’ and that caused me to look up more and research more, and it kind of all reached the peak when I was able to go to Japan and see everything firsthand. Ever since that moment I actually picked up that Japanese manga, I’ve been a big fan.”
He went on, “My dad is actually a pilot. I had been bugging him for a long time about actually going. I was like, ‘Yo, you gotta bring me along,’ and so he did, and it was amazing. I got to try authentic foods. I got to see the culture. And I also got stranded because he had to fly the plane back to the States, and I was doing standby. So the plane was full, and he had to leave me, and you can bet my mom did not like that. But it was an experience.”
Bringing the dazzling style of Tokyo, using holograms and other features:
“The technology, it looks like a fan almost, but there are LED lights attached to the fan,” Brand explained. “So it spins really, really fast, and it creates these images, almost as if they’re floating in midair. And pretty much, we’re just going to have anime characters just on these lights, and it’s going to just provide this fully immersive experience, and really transforming our venue space to look more like Japan.”
“Once you go to the back of Monday Night, they have this really large sliding wall, and so sliding that wall backward, that’s where you’ll see the actual party,” said Lindo. “So all of our vendors are typically in the back in the chandelier room. The DJ is back there. All the light installations that Troop is talking about are back there. We also have a car outfitted in anime; it’s an ‘itasha’ car. We pull that into the garage, to the brewery, and we park it in the back in that back room.”
And what about the sushi?
“A typical Trap Sushi involves, of course, the sushi. So that’s another thing – we love sushi. We like to say that we are experts in sushi,” said Lindo. “We eat all of it, and we’re very critical of sushi. So the sushi chef, we met him through a Japanese restaurant that we used to go to called Yuki Izayaka; it’s over in Duluth, off of Pleasant Hill… We were friends with the manager, so she introduced us to Chef Donny. He is a sushi chef at Wagaya, and Wagaya is another sushi restaurant in West Midtown, and so chef Donny is our sushi chef at Trap Sushi.”
Trap Sushi’s next event takes place on Aug. 25 at Monday Night Garage. Tickets and more information are available at https://trapsushi.splashthat.com/.
