Uochou

Rating: Very good
Meal: Dinner
Price: 3560 yen
Payment: Cash only
Dishes: Roasted boneless chicken, whelk, sake, awamori
English Menu: No
Smoking: Yes

Sake

Last night was Wednesday, so time to go a-hunting for a new place to eat.  I took the bus down past Kenritsudaigaku station, hoping to find a particular spot open.  It wasn't, so I backtracked along 16 towards the station and eventually came to Uochou, a small izakaya.  It's definitely not a spot many foreigners eat at, so they weren't sure if I should be there, but I bulled ahead.

Mandatory appetizer, tuna sashimi with goya and miso

I ordered a"big spicy roasted chicken" which turned out to be a roasted boneless chicken thigh/leg piece.  It was quite tasty.  I wanted some hotate and asked if it was on the menu, but it wasn't.  Instead I was recommended to try something else, and I accepted.  Turns out it was some kind of whelk.  Whelk is nothing like hotate, so I was a bit disappointed by that, but my bad for not checking the kanji first.

Roasted boneless chicken

I initially ordered some cold sake which went down nicely.  Later I saw they had a 6 year old version of my favorite brand of awamori (Zuisen), so I had to try that too.  It was very good.  So the price above can probably be reduced by a couple thousand yen for just food.

Whelk

What I really enjoyed was chatting in broken Japanese with the hostess, an older lady who seemed quite friendly to all her customers.  A couple of other guys came in and she seemed to know exactly what they wanted without their asking.  Her son was working the kitchen, and he seemed very serious and dedicated.