I’ve been keeping up a pattern of fine dining by day and izakaya-hopping by night. This day, too, I’d heard about a delicious izakaya that competes on shellfish dishes alone, so I went to check it out. Koenji, where this place is, is the part of Tokyo where young people – broke and free-spirited – gather and live, so it’s not exactly packed with great restaurants, but thanks to a local, I had a wonderful food experience that day.
It’s almost at the very end if you walk all the way north up the Koenji shopping street, but since it’s tucked down a side lane it wasn’t easy to find. I was following the map on my iPhone and still walked right past it the first time. It’s a very shabby place: the ground floor has seats for 7-8 people packed shoulder to shoulder, and upstairs, reached by a small, steep staircase, there are two tables for four. The ground floor was already full of locals, so our group went upstairs, and the service was a bit slow compared with the counter. It was a little inconvenient having to order well ahead, but you have to put up with that much.
Beer first
Maybe because it was a trip in the hot summer, the beer tastes like honey. I can’t even count how many draft beers I emptied on this trip.. The glass says “a drop of sake is a drop of blood!” That’s something I heard a lot in university. Back then I really had no money and only stamina, and I remember drinking cheap booze until I dropped. These days I couldn’t do it even if you told me to, but I think I understand how the owner feels.
Otoshi
Now that the beer is here, a snack has to come with it. It seems to be the innards of a shellfish, pickled, but the soy sauce flavour is strong, so the taste is just so-so. The soy sauce next to it is for the sashimi.
Three-kind sashimi platter
Fresh. The taste goes without saying.
The drinks menu
At a glance there don’t seem to be that many, but they’re all interesting sake. I ordered this and that. They said they weren’t serving the 10-year aged sake, which was a bit of a shame..
Summer daiginjo
Sake usually comes out in spring, but they said there was one released in summer, so I ordered it. It didn’t move me as much as nama sake does.
The first of three grilled dishes
As you’d expect from an izakaya specialising in shellfish, they use very fresh, extra-large clams. The prices aren’t high either.
Second, a turban shell and a clam topped with seaweed
Extra-large size. Great with drinks.
Hamaguri sakamushi (clams steamed in sake)
It’s the dish that cures your hangover while you’re still eating. Order it at a dodgy izakaya and you get a dodgy broth, but this place really does it properly. It cleared my stomach right out, and I went straight on to the next drink.
Oyster sauce stir-fry
The ingredients are fresh and in big chunks, so it’s delicious.. If taste matters more to you than atmosphere, you should go out of your way to find shabby izakaya like this one.
Nama genshu
I ordered it, but it arrived a little late. The ground floor is really cramped and packed with neighbourhood people, so it just wasn’t the kind of atmosphere where an outsider could sit down and eat. If I ever lived in Koenji, I’d probably end up having a drink at a place like that before heading home.
Water glass..
I seemed to have gone too hard on the drinks, so I asked for a glass of water. I was expecting a beer glass in this small, cramped, old izakaya, but out came a strangely modern tumbler..
This seems to be the third grilled dish.
Nice and chewy. In Korea we pile up clams by the heap and eat them, but in Japan they slice them a little at a time and eat them as a drinking snack. It’s a cultural difference, so I can’t say which one is better.
Kimo-miso onigiri
The older guys at the next table were eating it with such relish that we ordered one too. There’s kimo (liver) inside the onigiri so it’s well seasoned, and it’s grilled just right. An izakaya’s yaki onigiri is more a drinking snack than a rice dish, really. It was incredibly delicious, and I was moved.
Dashimaki tamago
Last up was the tamagoyaki. It was well made, but the yaki onigiri was so good that it overshadowed it.
Troika’s cheesecake
For dessert I brought out a cake I’d bought separately. It’s a cake you can only buy by reservation twice a week at the Iwate Prefecture antenna shop in Ginza, and it’s very, very rich. I have never in my life eaten a cheesecake this dense. Even compared with Tokyo’s famous shops, its level is in a class of its own. You could call it the undisputed king of cheesecakes. But because it’s so rich, if you’re not a cheesecake fanatic you might actually find it too much.
After eating this well, late at night I headed to Nakameguro to see a friend. Given the hour, most places were getting ready to close, so we went into an izakaya near the station that was still crowded with people at that time.
Caol Ila 8 Years
And then there was this single malt on display on the counter. It’s a bottle the owner brought in personally, and it’s not on the menu, but he said he could sell it if we wanted. Caol Ila 8 is a single malt that’s been coming out recently as a limited edition, a whisky with a very intense, impressive flavour. The price is a bit high for an 8-year-old, but if you set the age statement aside it’s an excellent single malt. The downside is that it’s a limited edition and hard to get hold of. This was the first time I’d seen it myself.. Since I kept staring at it, he poured me a glass. Thank you~