Eat, drink, travel Japan.
It’s 21:30 on a Wednesday inside Bar Benfiddich, four floors up a Nishi-Shinjuku building with no English sign. Hiroyasu Kayama, the bar’s owner, is crushing fresh wormwood with a brass pestle to garnish someone else’s drink. In front of me sits a Yoichi 12, neat, with the kind of hand-cut ice ball that costs the … Read more
The brewer at Matsumoto Shuzo poured the first cup, watched my face, and said: “Kyoto sake is not Niigata sake. It will not punch you. It will sit beside what you eat and let the food do the talking.” That sentence rearranged how I drink in Kyoto. I had been chasing the bigger, drier, mountain-rice … Read more
How does a city smaller than Yokohama end up with the loudest, most stubborn street-food culture left in Japan? Fukuoka does it the same way it does everything else: late at night, on a stool that wobbles, with a paper lantern over your head and a bowl of pork-bone broth that came out of a … Read more
The first kushikatsu I had in Osaka was a single skewer of pork belly at a counter in Shinsekai, around 18:30 on a Wednesday in October. The man behind the fryer dropped six bullets of breaded skewers into the oil at once, lifted them out about ninety seconds later, and slid them onto a wire … Read more
The bartender at Bar Lupin in Ginza doesn’t speak. He carves a cube of ice into a sphere, sets it in a chilled coupe, pours a clear liquid over it, and the sphere rotates once, twice, then settles. The whole bar smells of cold lemon peel and old wood. Down a basement stair under the … Read more
It’s a Tuesday, half past nine, and I’m at the counter of a fourth-floor walk-up bar in Ginza, watching a bartender carve a sphere of ice with a bread-knife the length of his forearm. The pour costs ¥1,800. The bottle behind him is a thirty-year-old Hibiki, and the back wall is racked four shelves deep … Read more
I poured my own beer first, knocked back a long swallow before anyone else had a glass in hand, and watched the proprietor at a small Yurakucho counter freeze for about half a second. Long enough that I noticed. Short enough that he was already smiling again by the time the next person sat down. … Read more
A bottle of shop-brand sake from a Tokyo supermarket runs ¥800 and clocks 15% alcohol. A bottle of honkaku shōchū from the shelf above it costs ¥1,500 and reads 25%. A bottle of 10-year aged Okinawan awamori two shelves down asks ¥6,800 and tips 43%. All three are made from rice or grain. All three … Read more
Ask for sake in Japan and you’ll often get a slightly puzzled look. The word doesn’t mean what you think it does. In Japanese, sake (酒) is the umbrella term for any alcoholic drink, beer and whisky included. The thing tourists order at sushi counters and the thing brewed from rice and water and koji … Read more