Eat, drink, travel Japan.
City-by-city eat and drink guides — Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Fukuoka, Sapporo.
The trip almost didn’t happen. I’d booked an Aomori brewery visit at the end of a rushed week, the second of three trains had run late out of Sendai, and I walked into the brick warehouse of Hachinohe Shuzo apologetic and damp, wanting only to nod my way through the tour and find a hotel. … Read more
Hyogo and Kyoto produce more sake than the next eight prefectures combined. Two of Kansai’s six prefectures, side by side, brew over half of Japan’s nihonshu in any given year. Most travellers I’ve met think Niigata when they think sake. They’d be wrong about where the country actually makes the stuff. Kansai is the heartland. … Read more
Ask anyone who knows a little about Japanese whisky to name a Hokkaido distillery and they’ll say Yoichi. Push them for a second one and most stop talking. Yet the island has at least four working whisky distilleries with visitor programmes, and the youngest of them sits in ski country running gin alongside its single … Read more
The smell hits first. Warm, yeasty, faintly sweet, like bread dough left to rise next to roasting sweet potatoes. Then the humidity, which clings to your shirt within seconds of walking in. Then the sound: the slow blub of moromi mash bubbling in clay pots the size of bathtubs, and somewhere behind a sliding door, … Read more
Smoke first, then sound. Charcoal smoke pushing out from under a corrugated awning, mixing with cooking-fat steam and someone’s cigarette. Then the noise: tongs clinking, a ten-second burst of laughter, the staticky beep of an order screen, a salaryman saying otsukaresama three times to someone he’s never met. I’m standing in Omoide Yokocho at 19:30 … Read more
I came into Nagoya planning one meal between Tokyo and Kyoto. I left three days later, full of red miso, with a notebook of bar addresses I still had not visited. The city does not market itself the way Osaka markets street food or Kyoto markets tea. It just feeds you, hard, with a regional … Read more
Hiroshima Station to Saijo by local train: 31 minutes, ¥420. From the platform, you walk five minutes to a thousand-year-old sake town with seven working breweries lined up between two thin streets. The Peace Memorial Park, the place every guidebook starts you, is in the other direction. Most foreign visitors never make it to Saijo. … Read more
Niigata Prefecture has 91 active sake breweries, more than any other prefecture in Japan. The next-densest, Hyogo and Kyoto, are still well behind, and they are giants of population and visibility. Niigata sits on the Sea of Japan with under two million people, and yet for every 22,000 residents there is a working kura turning … Read more
The bowl came down on the counter at Amatsubo just before nine on a wet March evening, kaisendon piled until the rice underneath had given up trying to be visible. Sweet shrimp, snow crab, yellowtail, two kinds of tuna, salmon roe in a glossy heap, and on top of that the proprietor laid down a … Read more
The hiss when a tallboy opens at 14:33 on the platform of Tokyo Station, two minutes before the Hayabusa pulls out for Sendai, is one of those sounds you don’t notice until you’re listening for it. Then you hear it everywhere. The salaryman in row 17. The retired couple sharing a Sapporo Classic. The two … Read more
Hiroyasu Kayama brews bitters from wormwood he grew in Saitama. He stands in a white lab coat behind an L-shaped counter on the ninth floor of an office block in Nishi-Shinjuku, mortar in hand, grinding spices into powder that will end up in your daiquiri. The bar is called Bar Benfiddich. There is no English … Read more
It’s a Wednesday at 19:30 on the tenth floor of a Shinjuku building I would never have walked into without instructions, and the proprietor is sliding three small glasses across the counter towards me. Niigata. Yamagata. Akita. He pours each one to the brim and a little over, the way most sake bars in Tokyo … Read more
It was the second pour of Yoichi single malt at a Hokkaido bar called Crossroad that justified the whole trip. Eleven days in, three flights, two shinkansen, six cities, more sake cups than I can count, and the moment I sat down at that backlit shelf and asked the bartender to pick what I should … Read more
Yamazaki sells out the moment its booking lottery opens, and you need to apply months ahead. Yoichi runs free tours all day, walk-up tickets sometimes available the same morning. The two most famous Japanese whisky distilleries are 1,500 km apart, run on opposite booking systems, and ask very different things of you as a visitor. … Read more
The smell hits before the sign does. Charcoal smoke and frying oil, soy and beer foam, the faint reek of cigarette ash from a bar where smoking is still legal. You stop, turn, and there’s a doorway you missed twice on the same street: a noren curtain at chest height, fluorescent strips behind it, and … Read more