Eat, drink, travel Japan.
Where to drink in Japan — izakayas, neighbourhood bars, themed bars.
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
A lemon sour at an Omoide Yokocho stall costs about ¥500. Six counter seats away from the cook, no English menu, you point at a skewer and a cold glass arrives without ceremony. The same drink does not exist on the list at Birdland in Ginza, where an omakase yakitori course starts north of ¥10,000 … 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
I ordered otōshi three times. I didn’t realise I’d ordered it once. The first time I sat down at an izakaya in Tokyo, the staff brought a small dish of pickled mountain vegetables I hadn’t asked for. I ate them, smiled at the bartender, and wondered if I’d accidentally eaten someone else’s food. Twenty minutes … 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
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 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
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