Gen text
You place a phone call across an ocean at noon JST/9p CST precisely a week in advance, and after five busy signals someone with good English picks up. You give him your info, he asks if it’s your first time, you say no it’s your fourth, he profusely thanks you, and then you hang up.
You show up ten minutes early to a completely empty 8-seat bar, and a guy with the same voice. The only sound is a water trickle from… what? A hand-washing station? It’s never used. You are in one of the better bars on earth, but to call it a “bar” is sort of a misnomer. It’s a genre of one, a place that serves low-ABV, fruit-forward booze in tasting menu form.
He went to New York & New Jersey to study cocktails, which boggles the mind, somewhat. I suppose you learn stuff there, but: why not Tokyo, the cocktail epicenter of the planet, where he already lived? Then he came back, worked in Tokyo for a bit, and started his own bar in 2013. Twelve years of slow refinement later, there you are, being served drinks on the center-cut section of a 500-year-old tree.
Unlike other Tokyo bars, there is no music, no encyclopedic wall of whiskey options, relatively bright lighting, no wild shaking. Closer in tenor to a high-end sushi or tempura spot than a cocktail bar. You can’t get a nightcap here: you’re there for 4, 6, or 7 cocktails, that’s it. After twelve years, knowing how good this all is, why is there nothing similar in the world?
One guy, a single-digit number of seats, nothing but him & his craft. Ikebana, indirect lighting, highly seasonal, library-grade silence, and somehow none of it is awkward or intimidating. This could probably only happen in Japan, or rather: Japan is the most likely place for it to happen. There’s a whole documentary about this sort of guy. He is not alone; he is a product of the culture.
The word “balance” comes up often when you chat with him. Knowing that all spirits are heavy in flavor, he works hard to mute all of that, to make something that’s more generous & legible. The consequence is something both intensely flavorful and soft, every single time, even the one made with wasabi at the end. It helps that there’s not much booze in there, of course.
After two cocktails, you realize he is eyeballing everything, making it all up on the fly. He tastes as he goes, adding a little X a couple of times, then serving. When you ask him how he made a cocktail, he gets the most post-verbal you’ll see all evening, mumbling something about volume and needing to quiet it, which is both intellectually reasonable and completely unhelpful.
By the end, you have 7 cocktails and are precisely 1 cocktail of buzzed. You pay, thank him, keep the handwritten receipt forever, and write text about it.