A brief post today on somewhere that has been open for a while but I have only recently got round to visiting. Sadly this is the same old story for me recently. The backlog is now huge again. My inclination to visit new places has collapsed and has coincided with me now being unemployed. (My boss was a nightmare and it was doing me no good working there. But losing the salary isn’t exactly encouraging me to start visiting new places. If anyone wants to offer me an extremely well paid part time job, please send me an email. And please send me lots of donations, eh?). My only hope for getting this backlog under control is if we suddenly have a load of new places close down, immediately clearing them off my ‘to visit’ list. That’s not really in the spirit of things though, so I won’t wish for that. And who knows, maybe another gem will crop up soon? Uetomi is not the next wonder find, but it is a pretty nice place with plenty of interest for people who like to drink craft beer. Here’s what you need to know.
– Quite small with seats for around six at tables and for the same again at the two counters. This place is an izakaya with craft beer, so food is a focus here. It feels a lot brighter than a normal izakaya is though and the decor is quite modern, but with some bikini posters around which drags the mood back to the 70’s or 80’s if that’s your thing.
– The beers are in bottles and cans and are in the fridges to the right as you enter. The place is cash on delivery, so you just grab your beer from the fridge, along with a glass and take it to the counter to pay. They are mainly imports and mainly stuff from the US, but there were some interesting breweries and a mix of styles. There were some European imports too, I spotted Magic Rock (although seeing as they were taken over by a macro, perhaps I shouldn’t mention them). They also had Brimmer bottles for those of you who are looking to keep things Japanese.
– The place is no smoking and there’s no cover charge. I didn’t check if there’s wifi. Sorry! One slightly surprising thing is that it’s open during the day, every day and that it closes fairly early. So maybe my izakaya description doesn’t really fit that well.
I quite enjoyed my time here but was caught out by the early closing. Otherwise I think I would have stayed a lot longer. The beer prices were reasonable and the little bit of food I had was nice. It’s definitely a place with a different feel from lots of the other establishments on here, and I’ll be back visiting again some time soon. It is emblematic of a recent welcome change in that there now seems to be places opening that aren’t craft beer focused places, but which have nice beer. Long may that continue!
Japanese breweries on tap when I visited:
Brimmer (but bottles only)
Opening Hours:
11:30-22:00 daily
Location/map:
上原1-1-21 1F, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo