Y’know, I keep saying I’ve had enough of sake for a while, but I keep going back to the well. Also, in the same way that I always want to start off with raw fish at an izakaya, I kinda like Japanese food on weeknights, foreign food for a fancier Saturday night. Must be getting old since these […]
izakaya
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Wakamatsu, Morishita (魚所若松)
These solitary Friday night excursions are getting to be a habit. It’s just nice to decompress from all the stress of the week with a glass of sake, a plate of fish, and a new copy of Nuts magazine. Hey, what are you laughing at? Wakamatsu languishes in the middle of the square described by […]
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Asahi, Kasai (ろばた旭、葛西)
After leaving Uogokoro, I felt like the night was young. I had neither eaten nor drunk much, and more to the point I hadn’t found any funny people to hang out with. The closest was the really rough looking party down the counter who were talking about me until I mentioned that I could understand […]
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Uogokoro, Kasai (魚ごころ、葛西)
So, you know, a stressful week at work…made me want to do something quiet and contemplative, by myself. So I looked up some likely sake places in… and headed along after work. Let’s not beat about the bushes, Kasai is pretty dull. I went out this way once before (it’s farther east than my place, […]
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Akaoni, Sangenchaya (赤鬼)
The Red Devil is a famous place – certainly it was packed almost from the opening on the Sunday that we went (Woody, Poshand, me, taking advantage of their special 5 PM early-opener on Sundays). You’ll want to reserve if you go, and in return you’ll get access to a pretty magnificent list of sakes. […]
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Shinkomachi, Kiba (新小町)
Ahhhh, I kinda forgot to take a picture of the exterior here. It’s funny, where the place I went just before was empty, this was packed. I squeezed into the counter, which required several people to move their coats (and later required me to move mine when the last 2 seats filled up. Come to […]
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Tanyao, Kiba (たんやお)
Bait and switch, my friends. It’s an old trick. If you look closely at Tanyao’s sign, you’ll see that it clearly says ‘jizake’. I saw this a week or two ago when I went to the nearby bathhouse. When it got to be a Friday night and I had nothing else to do, I thought […]
Yamahei, Monzennakacho (酒蔵 や満平)
Documented fact – Don Henley’s Building the Perfect Beast is a great album. In addition to being a veritable catalog of 80’s effects (the constant use of FM synthesizers, one would imagine DX-7’s?; the gating on the snares (or at least the quick release times on the envelopes of the snare samples!); the washy reverb), […]
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Omasa Komasa, Higashi Nakano (大政小政)
He means well. I want to preface all that follows with my emphatic belief that he does mean well. The waitress at Ranman (who was really lovely, in such a sweet and motherly way) told us it would take about 15 minutes to walk to Higashi Nakano, but warned that “It’s really dark.” While a […]
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Ranman, Nakano (らんまん)
No joke, after Okajouki we needed something more satisfying. (Nuts, did I really just write something that stupid? Well, you know the rules – no edits.) Ranman was it. In our party (which enlarged at this point) there was general agreement that this is one of the best pure izakayas ever. EVER! In the history […]