Making Your Stand At Standing Bars In Japan

There are no seats available in the bar, or the restaurant.  Not that there is no room.  Plenty of room for you, just no seats.  Welcome to the tachinomi, Japanese bars and restaurants where every customer stands, by design.

Japan has many cultural institutions no other country seems to have.  Pachinko, vending machines selling underwear, and of course the maid cafés.  Here’s another: Tachinomi (meaning “stand-drink”), or sometimes tachinomiya and sometimes tachigui (“stand-eat”).  Standing bars and restaurants, where you are at a counter or a high table and everything else is normal, just no seats at all.  You take a stand for your entire experience there.

 

Someone will ask: why?  The gods intended us to sit in places like a bar and a restaurant, so desu ka?  That’s why we have butts.  No no, fate wants us to take a stand; that’s why we have feet.  It’s surprising the difference standing creates.  Sitting, I now find, tends to make a person withdraw, to mentally construct that cocoon.  Standing engages our social instincts.

Besides one standing bar in Tokyo that utterly ignored me, and that I walked out of, I’ve never met a standing place I didn’t almost love, so much that I now seek them out.  I’ve never left one without several conversations with the people around me.  Standing in a place makes it communal, even more than if everyone shared one long table.  It’s like being in a cocktail party.  People tend to have their spots but it’s still easy to mix and mingle, and you’re almost guaranteed to at least meet the people next to you, if not half the establishment.

 

My first experience was in a standing sushi bar in Shibuya, a neighborhood in Tokyo, and I’ve been to a few more since then.  Most standing restaurants are for sushi, where everyone bellies around the counter.  Interaction with the chefs is constant; everyone orders only a couple pieces at a time, which are handed over across the counter.  There is no real waitstaff in a tachinomi, no difference between front of the house and the back.  You deal directly with the people making the food.

How it works:  Walk in and look for a space at the counter.  Squeeze in.  The chefs will hand over anything you need such as plates (or a banana leaf at one place), or more likely, plates and utensils and such will be stacked on the counter someplace, perhaps in front of you or on a corner where you grab them yourself.  Other items such as gari and wasabi and tea will also be in front of you, in containers.  Help yourself.

Secure a menu.  When ready, catch the eye of someone behind the counter and order a few items, not many.  You go slowly; a dozen rounds of ordering is absolutely normal.  They’ll keep track.  I usually order two types of fish at a time.

 

Standing sushi bar in Tokyo.  The fish is served on the banana leaves.

Another appeal to the standing sushi bars is that the sushi has always been brilliant.  It shouldn’t be.  They’re full of warning signs, like the fish being sliced in advance, not to order, a clear violation to sushi purists.  Yet they’ve always been well above average, perhaps because of their laser-like focus just on sushi and nothing else.

 

My latest visit was to Uogashi Nihonichi, a standing sushi bar in Shinjuku, Tokyo.  To my left was a Japanese couple from elsewhere in the country who acted like they had never had sushi before.  To my right was a guy with his mom, both Middle Eastern origin now living in Germany.  We all chatted over sushi types, comparing and contrasting, before one of the chefs grabbed our menu and said, “You want good?  This and this and this,” pointing at the menu.  Valuable lesson: eat what the chefs like, not just what you like.

The guy and his mom were spending oodles of money.  The Japanese couple seemed hesitant to order anything.  We all helped each other out, starting by immediately ordering what the chef recommended.  We all left only after conversations about where to buy the best tea, good department stores, and camera shops.  And the sushi was brilliant.

 

Back again in Shibuya, Tokyo, at a standing place called Nagi, more of a real restaurant.  Patrons stand at the counter, but also at multiple high tables in the space around it.  Nagi specializes in sake, mostly from Fukushima, and is very interested in serving food that goes along with it.  Nagi was packed when I arrived, with two guys in the door waiting.  We three quickly started talking, but the staff found me a single place at the counter and them a table in a corner.  I was next to four very cute young women who quickly helped me with the menu as my two door friends watched me jealously.

I ate an oyster stew, cooked on a burner right in front of me, while drinking marvelous sake and chatting up the girls.  Later, I went over to talk with the two guys again who lamented being in a corner.  “That’s why the counter is better,” one told me, “you get to meet girls.”

 

 

Shinsekai is a strange area of Osaka, an entertainment district created in 1912 with both Coney Island and Paris as its models.  It’s seen much better times, just like the real Coney Island, and these days is rather run-down.  The vibe is nostalgia, both in a “people used to love this!” and a “this will probably be torn down soon” way.

The Thing to Eat here is kushikatsu, which is battered, deep-fried items on skewers.  This is different from tempura because, oh, I don’t know; it just is.  At least they’re not pretending it’s high art food.  Kushikatsu is junk food, and everyone acts like it’s junk food, refreshing.  I walked by a standing kushikatsu joint, and the two customers inside called me in.

 

 

The two men were older, retirees, and nobody spoke any English.  We communicated with my bad Japanese and through pantomime.  One guy bought me a sake.  His friend was drinking soju, which some Japanese mix with soda water, and together, they led me through the kushikatsu procedure.  The skewers I ordered were pumpkin, shrimp, eggplant, potato, tuna, cheese, mushroom and a few others.  Perhaps nine items, and when they came, it didn’t matter that I couldn’t identify which is which.

Some nuances to eating kushikatsu exist, and the man next to me showed me a few, such as eating it with cabbage leaves and the strict dictum that you can dip your skewer only once into the communal sauce.  No double-dipping.  I was warned many times.  He treated me to another dish, one of the most nasty meat dishes I’ve ever seen.  Later, Google Translate translated it into “beef grizzle”.  At least it was covered in so much sauce I couldn’t taste the beef very well.

 

Most standing bars are small places, and that may be the reason they’re standing.  More people can pack in, and even if a place looks full, there’s probably room for you.  Choikichi (ちょい吉) is a small standing bar in the center of Kanazawa, a city on the west coast of Honshu, the main island.  The space used to be an ice cream parlor, having one narrow corridor with just a bit of space near the front door.  A dozen people would fill it up.  No romanized sign; you must look for the Japanese.

Some locals just call it “Mama’s bar”.  Her small menu, Japanese on one side and English on the other, is divided into categories such as beer, sake, whiskey and such, with some snacks listed, more snacks on the Japanese menu than on the English.

One other male customer was there when I entered, carefully watching the TV above his head.  I was going to stay just for a sake (¥500, about $4.5 USD), but you know how these things go.  Two more guys came in and started talking, then two more, and I stayed for four sakes.

 

 

A livelier place, though still tiny, is in the very southern city of Miyazaki, on the very southern island of Kyushu.  A tiny alley near the center of the city holds several drinking places, a common scene in Japan.  I passed one called Shinato (角打ち しなと) holding about three males and three females, and they immediately called out to me.  I stepped in without hesitation, and the place erupted.  They were shocked that I, a foreigner, really came in.  There must have been moments of awkwardness at the beginning, but I don’t remember any.  It was all cool, because they were all drunk.

The two barmen there got to know me quickly and took care of me, pouring red wine.  I met everyone in the place.  Shinato is tiny, with a railing right in the middle that creates two lines of drinkers.  Everyone stands very, very close, and that’s part of the secret to a standing bar.  Personal space is gone, so why not get to know the person you’re pressing against?

The next evening, I was back there, only to find a handful of other foreigners inside, Greeks.  I introduced myself.  “Tom?” one guy said.  “Oh, so you’re Tom.  The barmen were talking about you, thinking you’ll be in tonight.”

 

My favorite standing bar is so appropriately named Happy Stand, in Kyoto.  It’s on the north end of the narrow but very long pedestrian alleyway called Pontocho, which you should definitely cruise when you visit Kyoto, you and the other 10,000 tourists.

Drinks are cheap at Happy Stand, ¥500 for a sake ($4.5 USD) or splurge on a ¥700 glass of sparkling wine ($6.3 USD).  Don’t order their red wine, not worth it.  The food menu is extensive, mostly bar snacks, mostly small plates, like grilled squid or fried potatoes.  Tachinomi are simply cheaper than sit-down places; that’s part of their appeal.  Another appeal is they’re quick and super casual.  You can be in and out as fast as you want.  In many, you pay as you go, so you can just walk out anytime.  When you need a check for the others, just ask for “checku” or make an “X” sign with your two index fingers.  As everywhere in Japan, bring cash, not cards.

Most standing bars are small, narrow, but Happy Stand is square with some open space and largely open to the outside, a bit of an exception.  Happy Stand made me realize the appeal of the tachinomi, if you treat it like a cocktail party.  The guy next to me, Hiro, strikes up a conversation and introduces me to the owner Kenji, I think.  My memories of the place are a bit hazy.  Kenji is a certain type of Japanese, the wild and crazy type.  He has frizzy hair and a round face and he’s crazy friendly.

 

Inside Happy Stand in Kyoto

In a standing bar, you can wander around.  Behind me at a table is a couple, a very large man and a small woman who want to talk politics.  They’re eating crazy amounts of food and grab a plate for me to share.  More and more people enter the conversation.  I met Hiro’s girlfriend, Tomoko, and nearly everyone else.  At some point in a standup bar, the discussion has more characters than a 19^th-century Russian novel.

Tomoko and I are outside the door, dancing in the light rain, Hiro is friending me on Facebook, the large and small couple are talking about their time at Syracuse University, and Sophia Loren is dancing in an old Mambo Italiano music video on the large screen.

 

 

I don’t know any other country that has this tradition, besides perhaps some Irish pubs or Spanish tapa places.  I’ve been in bars here and there without seats, such as this neat place in Sicily, but it’s not common.

The first time I visited Japan I felt very much the outsider.  It’s not that the country was very foreign, it’s the way the people treated me.  That has slowly changed, and part of it was getting out of Tokyo.  The Japanese are very nice and friendly people, especially outside the capital.  In one Tachinomi in Kyoto, I imitated the coldness of the Kanto-jin (Tokyo-ites) compared to the friendliness of the Kansei-jin (people around Kyoto) and the joke brought the house down.

Tachinomi, sure even in Tokyo, go a long way to helping you meet some Japanese and enjoy your time there.  People standing around together are comrades, so please go practice your stand-up routine in a tachinomi, somewhere.