Eat, drink, travel Japan.
Japanese whisky — distilleries, bars, bottles, regions.
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
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