I'm hungover in Tokyo, trying to remember how many drinks I had the night before.
Does the beer at the yakitori place count?
The backlit shelves of shrunken liquor bottles in my hotel mini bar give me flashbacks.
Did I actually finish that precisely mixed Sidecar?
Below the airplane bottles is a shelf of elegantly proportioned highballs and lowballs.
That was cask-strength Scotch bottled specially for Ginza; 110 proof. Suntory time, indeed.
Midway through a weeklong high-end bar crawl, I'm learning that this city takes its drinking very seriously. In Tokyo, the mini bars actually look like miniature bars.
My friend Shinji Nohara calls up from the lobby. He was out with me until two in the morning, yet claims he feels tip-top. When he says we should go for tempura, I know he's lying. A fried-food lunch is international code for "I'm hungover." Two bottles of Kirin and a hundred dollars' worth of fried fish later, we feel better and plan that evening's tour: First, the place that only serves drinks in Baccarat crystal, then the spot that specializes in shochu infused with seasonal fruit, then the lounge presided over by an up-and-coming female bartender. Followed by the inevitable tempura lunch. Such are the hazards of researching a story about a city of countless hidden speakeasies, impossibly artistic mixology, and infinite drinks. Welcome to Tokyo, cocktail capital of the world.
I'm here because I've heard from professional foodies, itinerant bartenders, and other bibulous travelers that Tokyo was besting New York and London at the cocktail game. Mixologists from Sydney to San Juan were returning from pilgrimages and breathlessly describing their experiences as epiphanic. Bartenders were attending traveling seminars to learn Japanese technique. So, armed with a sheaf of recommendations and my friend Shinji as translator and guide, I hit the streets, subbasements, and skyscrapers of Tokyo to experience this cocktail revolution firsthand.
In that sparkling, sprawling metropolis of 12.8 million people, there is as structured and codified a drinking culture as any in the world: At izakayas (Japanese pubs), salarymen are allowed to criticize their managers under the cover of alcohol. Sake and shochu are sold in vending machines on street corners. And as the evening draws to a close, it's not uncommon to see salarymen stumbling for the trains and taxis. Drinking is a culturally accepted form of extreme relaxation in an otherwise excessively civilized city.
I fill up with a defensive meal of yakitori beneath the Yurakucho Station train tracks and watch the city transition out of its workday and into its nightlife. Here, on the edge of Ginza, salarymen eat grilled chicken and drink beer before heading home or out for the night. Here is where mixology first took hold in the cafés nearly 100 years ago, and where legendary Tokyo bartender Kazuo Uyeda practices his craft today. To get to Tender Bar, you take an elevator to the fifth floor of an office building. If you see a salon with geishas getting their hair coiffed, you're on the right floor.
Uyeda is slim and dapper in his white dinner jacket and wire-rimmed aviators. He has invented some of Japan's cocktail canon: the Pure Love, made with gin, framboise, lime juice, and ginger ale, and the Shungyo, made of sake, vodka, green tea liqueur, and salted cherry blossom. Both were invented in the early '80s, when in America a Margarita made with fresh lime and real tequila was still a rarity. As his assistant bartenders prepare for the evening rush by hand-carving ice cubes, Uyeda tells me how, over the decades, Japanese bartenders preserved the American art of the cocktail while American bartenders neglected it. "The difference is that American bartenders aren't thinking enough about the customer," he says.
It's a bold statement, but compared to how Uyeda thinks about the art of bartending, it's true. Uyeda says that his approach to cocktail-making is grounded in the Japanese tea ceremony. It is an "adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order." Which is a pretty accurate description of how it feels to be in his elegant little bar, having white-jacketed bartenders mix perfect drinks while men in slim suits and women in wrap dresses and beehive hairdos chat quietly over cocktails with names like M-30 Rain and Tokio.
I learned about Uyeda through the online writings of Stanislav Vadrna, a Slovakian bartender who apprenticed under Uyeda. Vadrna teaches classes in Japanese bartending and has become a missionary of sorts, preaching the gospel of the "hard shake," Uyeda's signature technique, which purportedly produces a drink a full ten degrees colder than a standard shake does.
To see the hard shake in action, I order a gimlet and witness for the first time a precision that will be repeated at all the bars I visit in Tokyo: Uyeda lines up the bottles on the bar, labels facing the customer. With a single, quick twist he opens them and fills the shaker, which he shakes in a rapid-fire serpentine fashion that decelerates to a slow trot and then a standstill. "The gin is broken out," Uyeda says, "then comes back together, smoother, softer." Indeed, the drink contains a profusion of fine ice shards, and the acid from the lime and the alcohol in the gin have both mellowed. It's a bit light for my taste. Not a bad thing, given the night I have ahead of me.
Outside, Tokyo is in full swing, the streets crowded with students and salarymen. Two geishas gently help a drunken patron into a taxi, while the driver patiently waits, behaving as if the impeccable white lace doilies in the backseat aren't in peril. We turn off onto a side street, into an office building, and head two stories underground to Little Smith, where more white-jacketed bartenders stand behind a striking oval-shape, hand-hewn wooden bar. I say "omakase" to one, who smiles instantly. The phrase is usually spoken to sushi chefs when you want them to devise a special tasting menu. It means "I trust you." He instantly earns my trust by muddling Ukrainian chile-pepper vodka and a whole cooked tomato into an artisanal Bloody Mary.
Then it's on to Star Bar Ginza, where I have seven of the best drinks of my trip. Hidetsugu Ueno, the head bartender there, is so obsessive about his craft that he even makes his own bar snacks. He cures his own Japanese version of Spanish-style jamón in the mountains of the Akita Prefecture because he finds the traditional stuff too salty to serve with single malt Scotch. And Ueno's care with the bar snacks is just the beginning: When he stirs a Martini (and it will most definitely be stirred, not shaken), he uses a combination of chilled and room-temperature gin to achieve the proper viscosity. He shakes certain cocktails in a soft-sided plastic container to keep the ice from chipping too much. His ever-evolving drink menu is beyond seasonal: In winter it might be Champagne mixed with pomelo, but only during that citrus fruit's fleeting two-week season. In summer, rum is paired with ripe Okinawa mango.
It's autumn, so we have pear gin and tonics. And then fresh grape Tom Collinses. And then Gaja grappa. And then Madeira from 1968. "My birth year," says Ueno. We have Sidecars, which are perfectly balanced. He carves us a perfectly spherical ice diamond with no fewer than 14 facets. And over the ice goes Scotch. My final memory of the night is Shinji shaking my hand, expressing his eternal gratitude for showing him something so transcendent in his hometown. I don't know which of the drinks is talking, but I do know it's breakfast time in the U.S. and bedtime in Tokyo.
I blame a bar back in New York for the headache I have here in Tokyo the next day. At Angel's Share in Manhattan's East Village, I first became fascinated with Japanese-style bartending. The bartenders were Japanese and wore bow ties and crisp white shirts and shook textbook-perfect classic cocktails in gleaming vintage shakers. It was the coolest, old-schoolest, Jazz Age mixological marvel I'd ever seen. Influential bartenders, like Sasha Petraske of the New York neo-speakeasy Milk & Honey, credit Angel's Share as inspiration.
To put this all in perspective—and to take a much-needed break—I visit Tokyo's Meiji Jingu shrine, on the edge of the Harujuku neighborhood, home to fashion boutiques and Tokyo's wild teenage street style. On the path leading to the shrine, I pass through a canyon of alcohol. On one side of the path is a 20-foot wall of sake barrels. Across from that is a rack of 50 barrels of exceptional Bordeaux. These are offerings to the temple spirits and a symbol of the Japanese tradition of cross-cultural exchange. This tradition was first ushered in by Emperor Meiji in the late 19th century, the era in which the Savile Row suit became the standard uniform of the Japanese salaryman and French food became all the rage.
The Meiji period also just happened to coincide with the golden age of the cocktail in Europe and America. During the Meiji period, the first cocktails were served in Tokyo in Ginza cafés like Café Printemps and Café Lion, which employed bartenders who'd learned the craft at the luxury hotels of Asia. They made the Bamboo and the Million Dollar and the Singapore Sling, cocktails served at The Grand Hotel in Yokohama and Raffles Hotel Singapore. Tokyo café society embraced these cocktails and the Japanese fascination with cocktails was born.
On my last night in Tokyo, at Peter, a bar at the top of the brand-new Peninsula Tokyo hotel, I realize that the city's most skilled bartenders are modern-day practitioners of the Meiji-era tradition: taking the West and East and fusing the two with the utmost respect. I'm there with Shinji and he can barely read the names of the drinks, which are written in a form of the kanji script usually reserved for writing haiku. "I haven't had to read this since grade school," he says. We order drinks that are inspired by and named for the seasons.
The walls of Peter are computerized. Guests appear to walk amid the Tokyo skyline that is projected onto the wall; as it morphs electronically, digitized leaves follow in the wake of diners heading to their tables. Shinji and I debate where to go next: Tokyo Kaikan, where the late, great Mr. Martini schooled Kazuo Uyeda? To the Imperial Hotel, where the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed bar is perfectly preserved? We think better of it. We've had enough for the night, and decide to toast the city. And here's where all the revelations of a cocktail tour of Tokyo cease to surprise. It comes down to the drink at hand and to living in the moment. And whether you're in an old izakaya, in a Ginza cocktail bar, or at the top of the newest luxury skyscraper hotel, that toast would still be "Kanpai."
View a slideshow of images from this story.
Check out an annotated map of Tokyo showing where to taste the best of the city's cocktail revolution.