Hideaki Sakai doesn¡¯t make it easy to find his diminutive premises. Hidden on the second floor of an anonymous building on a quiet backstreet on the ¡°wrong¡± side of Shibuya, it is invisible from the street. You access it through an unmarked door next to an offal specialist grill, up a steep flight of stairs that seem to lead nowhere.
You will not be the first to hesitate at the bottom of those unpromising steps. But this is intentional: Sakai Shokai is not a place you are meant to stumble into by chance. If you¡¯re not with someone who¡¯s been there before, you need to call ahead and then try to navigate your way there. That¡¯s what makes it special.
Sakai first wet his feet as a chef while living in Australia, where he picked up his good command of English. Once back home, he immersed himself in contemporary Japanese izakaya culture, first at the (now-closed) Zetton; then at Shibuya¡¯s dynamic and ever-popular Namikibashi Nakamura; and finally a short spell at the equally hard to find (and impossibly hard to book) Kotaro.
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