Drink on Your Feet: Discover Tokyo’s Standing Bars
Tachinomi—bars and eateries you enjoy on your own two feet— are experiencing a renaissance in Tokyo — so you’d better be able to hold your liquor.
Photographs by Xavier Tera
TWILIGHT IS FALLING, and the area around Shimbashi commuter station — right by where Tokyo’s original 19th-century rail terminus once stood — blazes up into a mosaic jumble of signage and lights. Under the looming ads and vertical neons, rush-hour office workers stream through the arches beneath the overhead tracks and swarm down to the pocket-size drinking and snacking dens called tachinomiya (literally, standing-drinking bar) in the corridors and basements of certain office blocks. In the cozy glow of paper lanterns, they throng in low, old-school alleys redolent of sticky-charred yakitori and Yebisu beer.
Welcome to the sacred boozing and snacking ground of Tokyo salarymen — and these days, “OLs,” or office ladies.
The iconic Japanese term “salaryman” — it’s spoken in English — is an early-20th-century coinage. Some scholars have compared the suit-and-tie tribe to the samurai of old, and the notion isn’t so loony if applied to Japan’s post-WWII economic heroics, when white-collar work meant crushing hours, obligatory after-work binge-drinking with the boss, epic commutes, and chronic sleep debt. But eating and drinking standing up, while on the run, has roots long preceding modern Tokyo. Takashi Morieda, a prominent local food historian, explained to me that the city has famously been the domain of men. In the mid-19th century, he continued, there were three males to every two females in the city, half of them single at any given time, making for a city of snacking and premodern takeout. Sushi, soba, and tempura were often purchased from yatai (pushcarts) and eaten standing on the street. Booze was consumed while standing at sake shops.
Tachinomiya, a post-WWII extension, of sorts, of the yatai experience, were once regarded as seedy, smoky relics of “corporate samurai” culture. But just over a decade ago, with the opening of Buchi, a chic iteration that hawks boutique sakes, they became places where everyone wanted to be, including, finally, women. Squeezing together into a bar was a way for the famously shy Japanese young people to break the ice. There are now chichi standing tempura places, standing gourmet restaurants, and standing steakhouse chains like Ikinari (which recently arrived in New York). Meanwhile, in the Edo tradition, even many upmarket liquor shops continue to include standing corners for tasting.
TONIGHT, HOWEVER, I’M DOING Tan old-school hashigo-zake, literally “drinking ladder,” Japanese for pub crawl involving zero fancy mixology. I meet my guide — Robb Satterwhite, a tall, soft-spoken ex-New Yorker who moved to Tokyo more than 20 years ago and founded the Japanese gastronomy guide Bento.com way back in the ’90s — at Shimbashi, which has, he tells us, “like, 70 standing bars in a 200-meter radius of the station.”
Squeezed around a waist-high table at Shimbashi Yakiton, a pork-intensive tachinomiya perched at a crossroad of alleyways, I take in the smoky interior, packed with cheery after-work boozers. The place is straight out of central casting, a Tokyo answer to a timeless Parisian bistro or a weathered Seville tapas bar — except nobody litters. “There really aren’t upscale tachinomiya in Shimbashi,” Robb declares as a mini-pot of motsu-nikomi, a pork innards stew, hits our tabletop. “But this place is nice.” Plates of charred pig parts arrive. “Just don’t ask which pig parts,” he chortles. Um, pork anus? No, but there are tongue and diaphragm muscles, along with skewers of shiitakes. A group of young salarymen at the next table drain glasses of Hoppy, a low-alcohol pseudo-suds developed in the late 1940s to counter the Japanese beer tax on malt content. It’s drunk mixed with shochu, the distilled spirit. “Very nostalgic and back in vogue,” Robb murmurs, though a sip tastes like rye-bread-flavored soda water.
Back we head toward Shimbashi station, through the crowds still surging toward commuter trains. With the din of the tracks overhead, Robb leads us into an office building called Shimbashi Ekimae 1, a worn late-’60s structure with a single-mindedly gridlike facade. For connoisseurs of Tokyo nightlife, this is it: the Valhalla of boozing.
Sake and craft beer, highballs and shochu flow like a river at the tachinomiyas along the fluorescent-lit corridors of Ekimae 1’s ground floor. Our grail is Shinshu Osake Mura (“Alcohol Village”), a pleasant and raucous no-frills place with exterior tabletops set on stacked crates and an internal decor mainly of liquor ads and sake labels. Shinshu, explains Robb, is dedicated to snacks, beers, and sakes — some 100 rotating daily from 60 different breweries from Nagano Prefecture. To accompany our seven-buck flight of three sakes, we order a plate of juicy, taut wasabi-spiked “pig grits.”
I’m munching my way through smoked tofu when I catch sight of a slight, seventyish gent clad in a gray kimono with a fan tucked into the sash, geta sandals, a straw fedora, and a wide ready grin. This is Tani-san, a.k.a. Mr. Kimono.
“I’m retired from the IT business,” he introduces himself, taking a sip of his zippy namazake (unpasteurized sake), “and now I’m a proud full-time drinker while my wife is already in heaven!” Benign grin. “Being a pensioner,” he continues, “I like this place for its great booze at wine-shop prices and no cover charge!” Mr. Kimono worked for several years in Boston, and his English is excellent. He then launches into a string of thudding English puns, a type of humor the Japanese call oyaji gyagu — dad jokes.
As Robb heads off to wrestle a deadline, a small crowd collects around our table to expatiate on the new and old in tachinomi. “Salarymen culture changed after Japan’s ’90s downturn,” Mr. Kimono propounds. “Younger workers are no longer obliged to get yoitsubureru” — smashed — “with their bosses,” says another drinker. “People are here ’cause they wanna be here,” declares a third. “They are free spirits,” Mr. Kimono waxes, “as opposed to the old telex and fax days when you had to stay in the office till midnight to communicate with overseas. These days,” he sums up, “the Japanese drink when they want with whoever they want.”
OUR POSSE OF DRINKERS now includes a shy young office lady named Ayako, who comes here because her husband’s away and she’s lonely. There’s also a glassy-eyed food writer, a scholar of soba, who briefly whisks us over to a neighboring tachinomi called San Mon no Toku, where the house drink is shochu and the fare runs to umami-laden stews with big chunks of simmered radish and fishcakes. “Tachinomi are nice because you feel less guilty drinking while standing,” resumes one pickled expiator. “Like British pubs, they make us feel European.”
We continue our crawl, descending into the narrow basement corridors of Ekimae 1 and its connected building, Ekimae 2. A dim labyrinthine passage hides away half-curtained spaces, some barely big enough for just a counter, three stools, and a couple of standees, each tiny private worlds. In one we glimpse a heavily made-up woman singing karaoke all by herself. She gives us a lurid smile.
“They are like someone’s living room,” says Mr. Kimono. “Very Japanese, only regulars drink here.” In a wider, more public basement corridor, we walk past a clutch of hipster sake obsessives at a pocket-size bar dedicated to vintage sakes, then pass a tattered bar serving Chinese dishes each costing two bucks, then a micro-restaurant specializing in huge crabs from Hokkaido. Back on the ground floor, we inhale a quick $10 flight of select sakes at Kuri, and, at Shotbar Momo nearby, sip a five-buck, 12-year-old Yamazaki as we wait for our tonkatsu-sando — a sandwich of crisp breaded pork between perfect white bread cushions — from a spot across the way.
“Shimbashi Ekimae…a city within a city,” apostrophizes Mr. Kimono. “A city of drinkers!” We clink our glasses of whiskey and all say, “Kanpai!”
Top Six
The best tachinomiya around Shimbashi. Most lack websites, but a quick online search will surface the addresses.
1/Shimbashi Yakiton
1–14–8 Shinbashi, Yushin Bldg. 1F, Minato 105–0004
2/ Shinshu Osake Mura
Shimbashi 2–20–15, Shimbashi Ekimae Building №1, Minato, 105–0004
3/Jukuseikoshudokoro
Shimbashi 2–Chome 21–1, Shimbashi Station Building 2, Minato 105–0004
4/ Kuri Tachinomi
Shimbashi Ekimae Building 1F, 2Chome-20–15, Shinbashi Minato, 105–0004
5/ Tonkatsu Maruya
2–20–15 Shimbashi | Shimbashi Ekimae Bldg. №1 1F, Minato 105–0004
6/ Shotbar Momo
2 Chome-20–15 Shimbashi Ekimae Building 1, Minato, 105–0004
About the author: Moscow-born food writer Anya von Bremzen is the winner of three James Beard Awards for her books and journalism. She is the author of six acclaimed cookbooks including PALADARES, her latest book about Cuba, as well as a memoir, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, which has been translated into fifteen languages. Anya has written for Food & Wine, Travel+Leisure, Saveur, the New Yorker, and Foreign Policy magazines among other publications. She divides her time between Istanbul and Queens, NY.
