Domo is tucked into a strange little corner of town down by where the railroad tracks go under Colfax near the southern corner of Auraria campus.
Orange A is Dojo and green arrow is Buckhorn Exchange, for reference. Dojo is accessed by Santa Fe to 13th to Osage.
Lincoln Park separates Domo from Buckhorn Exchange. The two well known restaurants are four blocks apart. At 5:00 Tuesday there were a lot of people at the park. If you would ever want to see, say, a genuine piñata birthday party, then that park would be the place to be.
The residential buildings all around have a uniform quality collected in what appears to be duplexes or more. This is what made me think that on-base housing I've seen reminds me of projects. But here, the housing and the individual houses all have a tenuous well kept appearance to them. If the housing is public then the terms must be fairly strict. I don't know. There is a borderline poverty feel to the area without being actually rundown. Residential, minus the restaurants, it is still thoroughly urban.
The gate rolls closed for serious appearing closure but there is apparent evidence of attempted break in. Impossible to see how a place unique as this in a location as this would not draw attention but that is my own preconceptions showing through. It is also a dojo so any criminal element had just best watch out. There are black belts in there that consider the dojo their home, and they're very disciplined.
None of the dojo interior is shown below but that is another whole thing. I think originally the restaurant was started to support the dojo but I'm not sure about that. It seemed the dojo started concurrently with the restaurant with very little to go on, cushioned stumps of irregular diameter for seating, so very organic right where you fell it, and large suspended lamp shades fashioned from sticks, rope and Japanese newspaper. Authentic environment cleverly created out of available materials.
Visitors pass through a tight entrance that opens to a room that used to be the dojo.
The entrance is tighter than it needs to be, made tighter by the position of a lamp, so that the room it leads to, with some relief, seems larger than it actually is. The space is now fitted with stone tables and sawn log stools with cushions on top. Now the cushions are leather. That's new.
Visitors walk though this room for extra seating into the restaurant proper where the dining room and the kitchen are visible to each other.
These photos were lightened to pick up the detail that is missed when you walk through this room to the outside garden patio before your eyes can adjust to the change and to take in the details. There are a lot more decorative elements than the last time I was here. All the decorations I noticed adhere to a strict conformity driving the theme of an authentic rural Japan.
So that is the interior space of the original restaurant.
Now the garden is fully developed, and what a garden. It appeared that the tables are arranged on a pebbled area that comprises half the total garden, a pond occupies half of the remaining half. But that turns out to be wrong because the hill created by having dug the pond is not the edge of the property but rather the halfway line. So the garden extends doubly beyond what is immediately apparent, which you would know if you had been paying attention to where your vehicle is parked and the zig zag movements you made to get to your present spot. Gardens can be tricky that way.
The staff are adorable, every last one of them. And agreeable as well. People at another table sat down then abruptly got up and left. We asked about that and the waiter said, "we're not vegetarian enough for them." For some reason this simple plainspoken admission amused us tremendously.
The present dojo is visible through these doors. The bamboo implements are what caught my eye. They seemed at first the sort of objects collected for their thematic value to the restaurant, the thing that looks like a crab trap is a bit confusing, and the large bamboo paella tray, a tea leaf basket or something, but then it occurred to me they are probably the tools used for the garden. It's not junk, it's useable junk. The wind that kicked up showed us that the pebbles we were on didn't just groom themselves to leafless perfection.
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