Bar Generic
How much fruit juice can you get away with? Is 5% an ABV you can find yourself agreeing with? What is the purpose of using spirits at all if they’re not even the point? Is one standard alcohol unit worth a three-hour, $100 experience? Why aren’t more bars like this? These are the questions that you find yourself reckoning with a week after going to Bar Gen Yamamoto. There are many bars like it throughout the country – 8 seats, slow pace, one guy, no music, seasonal ingredients, reservations exclusively by phone in advance – and yet there are no bars like it anywhere.
It scans more as a fine dining experience than a cocktail bar. There is no wall of bottles, no set menu, just a guy riffing on what’s good. Farms deliver directly to him, he says; it makes the fruit fresher. You bask in the point of view, read the grammar, think about possibilities. You wonder what other fruit is sitting in the fridge. You ask yourself whether this was all planned or not.
Really you’re not there for the booze. I can’t stress this enough. Nobody even gets buzzed at Bar Gen Yamamoto, no matter how many cocktails you order. You mostly sit in silence while a stranger pounds every usable atom out of a quince. He tastes as he goes, usually two rounds of refinement, taking his mask off only while facing away from you, eyeballing everything. He tells you he’s been making cocktails in this exact room for two decades. When asked, he says he works from noon to “around 1:30am”, six days a week. 1:30am is well past last train in Tokyo. How does he get home? Does he live nearby? You get no real sense of the person. Is this sacrifice? Is this normal? (It’s normal.)
The bar is made from two single hunks of wood, cut from the same ridiculously old tree, joined in a mirror image. You wonder whether this bar arrived as a whole, consistent entity, beamed in from some other dimension; or if it was built in parts. Maybe he started with an IKEA bar, and replaced it with the hunk of wood later. Maybe the glasses were once Duralex. Or maybe there was just an investor. Or maybe this bar had a precedessor, and he moved in later. What happens to the wood, the glassware, the mottled custom shaker after he dies? No answers are furnished; you’re just here, sober, wondering, held.