Yooooooshta. It’s official. I have now been to all of the good sake places in Tokyo. Think you know another? Nope. Not good. This is the last one. Boo-yah! Good, I’m glad we could all agree on that. Back to work. Chalk up another one, Jimmy, another of Tokyo’s best i-zaka-ya’s gone under the bridge. […]
washoku
Onodera, Kagurazaka (おの寺)
There are a few places in Tokyo that I believe in enough to go back to, and a very few that I feel compelled to post more than once about. Obviously Onodera is one of them. The cooking is, if anything, better than I remembered. Onodera himself is a great guy. I offered him a glass […]
Ogura, Jinbocho (割烹 おぐら)
What’s uuuuuuup! I was trying to take a random picture on the street while Volleyball and I waited for the light to change, just something to say “Jimbocho is the sports-store neighborhood.” These women were pretty in-the-spirit, so I took another one with them posing better. And then got lost for 5 minutes looking for […]
- Kanda
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Uruwashi, Kanda (うるわし 神田)
Uruwashi. How did I miss this place? I’ve been on this street a dozen, a hundred times. The sign is big. The entrance is inviting, or at least the door opens and you can then go down the spare, elegant staircase and follow the tiled, cobbled path into the genkan. It’s this kind of place […]
- Other treats
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Aoki Chaya, Takao (景信山山頂・青木茶屋, 高尾))
The directions for getting to Aoki are superb. They just say 景信山の山頂に登って下さい – please climb to the top of the mountain. It’s a little tricky knowing how to get started though – we took the train to Takao, saw the massive line for the bus, and jumped in a taxi to the trailhead. Bloody investment […]
Mameya, Shintomicho (小料理 まめや)
Shintomi is a funny little neighborhood, and I like it. It’s not obviously charming – the main thing is small office buildings, but there are some nondescript modern apartments mixed in. And here and there, a shop or restaurant scratching out a living. Mameya’s building, an old townhouse built sometime early in Showa, reminds me […]
Saburoku Juhachi Hanale (三冨魯久汁八 華れ)
Hey, for starters, I didn’t make up the name. The kanji are a jokey reinterpretation, but evidently the expression is a mnemonic for “three sixes are eighteen,” and it was described to me as “Japanese math”. Really. Strikes me as one of those things like “Wow, man, it’s so mystical – if you take 2, […]
Sasaki, Kagurazaka (神楽坂 ささ木)
It is hard, my friends, to find really good kaiseki places in Tokyo that don’t break the bank. After this visit to Sasaki, I would say I know four (Onodera, Uemura, Sasahana…actually I could stretch to include Yuwaeru even though it’s absurdly cheap and high quality. And probably Fukahama. I suppose six is probably enough […]
Nana, Nihonbashi ()
Muromachi Coredo explorations continue; for a couple days I actually went to adjacent places on the 3rd floor – gotta get to ’em all eventually, so it’s actually better not to go to all the good-looking ones first. This place is nondescript from outside, but inside a long, wooded hallway leads back to the restaurant […]
- Otemachi
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Komeraku, Otemachi (ひとくち茶漬け 八十八楽 こめらく)
The green-ness here is quite striking, isn’t it? As are the low ceilings. These old-fashioned buildings in central Tokyo were not built with claustrophobics in mind. Or people were smaller back then. My favorite example of that style was the old JA building, which was dark and dirty and half-shuttered as well as claustrophobic. Now […]