Tender Bar, Ginza

originally posted by Jay Miller:
originally posted by scottreiner:
originally posted by Joel Stewart:
are there many old school bars with bartenders still wearing jackets in NY? Was just wondering if Ginza may be the last bastion....
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lots of clubs. the racquet club, the met club, doubles, etc... hotel bars. king cole, bemelman, etc...
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Is the Rainbow Room bar still around and worthwhile? Back in the old days it was my favorite place to take out of town visitors.
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A month or 2 ago I had friends visiting from Belgium and DC. I had read a piece that said "don't bother going to the top of the Empire State Building -- take them to the Rainbow Room for a drink!" That convinced me and we made a plan to meet at Rockefeller Center. Unfortunately when I called I learned that the Rainbow Room is now "closed to the public" -- perhaps one could book it for a wedding or meeting but you can't just go up and have a drink

Instead we went to the "Top of the Rock" -- same building, higher up. Fortunately for us it was a brilliant afternoon and you could see for miles and miles. I can certainly recommend Top of the Rock but not for cocktails. I bought combination tickets so we were all able to go to MOMA the next day.

After we wore out our eyeballs on "Top of the Rock"we took the subway down to the village and went to Do Hwa, a trendy small Korean restaurant with interesting mixed drinks that they seem to have invented themselves -- one that tasted very much of cucumber, one that had a rose petal in it and smelled of roses, and one that was damn hot.

I think Tony Bourdain's piece on Tokyo, on No Reservations had a segment on some old excellent Tokyo bartender. I have to wonder if it was this same guy.
 
Not to be outdone by Japanese noodle-making is the Japanese fanaticism for quality cocktails. To better experience the phenomenon, Tony visits Bar IshinoHana, world-famous for its exquisitely-crafted cocktails. According to Tony, the bartender spends an "agonizingly" long time making Tony's drink - relax man, it's going to be one-of-a-kind! In the pursuit of his hypothesis that the Japanese are obsessed with perfection, Tony asks the bartender what inspired him to become a bartender. Amusingly enough, the bartender answers his idol is Tom Cruise in Cocktail. How's that for an odd source of inspiration?
 
originally posted by Yixin:
Get over itThey're cocktails, not Cornas.
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Nor is it Woodbridge. The attitude that cocktails aren't worthy of serious consideration tends to be a self-fulfilling one.

There is a man on the other side of the earth who gets up most mornings and goes to his bar, a simple and quiet place where he himself makes the drinks, as he has been doing for 45 years. He uses fresh juices and freshly chipped ice, and he can seemingly perfectly judge the proportions of a drink by eyeballing them. He is patient with his time and entirely professional in his demeanor, taking care over the drinks that leave his hand. I would ask you when was the last time you saw a bartender shake with ice the ingredients of a tall drink (a long drink over ice) before pouring the mixture over new ice in a chilled glass? This is something that Mr. Uyeda does for every tall drink.

When he is not at the bar he attends to teaching younger apprentices the trade that he learned himself at a young age. Of course he has witnessed a great deal of change since he was a green student of the cocktail, back at a time when Tokyo was emerging from the ruins of a catastrophic world war. Much is different now. He shows people a skill set developed in that period half a century ago and that perhaps might have been lost in a head long rush towards the future. He passes on to others the preparation of drinks in a manner not disimilar in attitude from that which is shown for the rites of the tea ceremony.

My. Uyeda invests what he does with a sense of dignity, and in those gestures there is seemingly the hope that others will appreciate that kind of care.

I find it sad when that recognition fails to occur. When that happens, the world, to me, seems less civilized.
 
For those who might be interested, details about the (ongoing) Tales-derived experiment(s) are available here.

Turns out the original experiment was done with liquor that had been calibrated for a 75 degree "room temperature". That right there is a different situation than one would find at Tender Bar, or Star Bar, or Y&M, where the liquor itself has been chilled pre-shake. Also, and with the subsequent Pegu Club shake-off, the serving glassware (or dixie cup!) goes unchilled, again divergent from Tender Bar.

This for me indicates that the results of these experiements, while entirely interesting, do not correlate with what is happening in Ginza. If you shake a cold beverage with ice, you will have less dilution. You will also, most likely, have a colder final beverage. In fact, shaking the Hard Shake only makes sense to me if you are starting with chilled bottles. Otherwise you might well have too much dilution.

What this means for this reader is that the NYT article is flawed to bring to bear the results of the Tales experiment upon what Mr. Uyeda does each evening. They are not coequal, as the conditions are quite different. I find the results of the Tales experiment interesting. I find Mr. Uyeda's drinks delicious. But it turns out that those results are not Mr. Uyeda's drinks.
 
give it a rest

the main point is there's no point from that article

beyond that, anyone who's really interested should spend a year or so in japan - where the practice of the form really means something....and that's not just cocktails.
 
Levi:

Thanks for the heads-up on this bar and Mr. Ueda.
I had never heard of either before this post as cocktails really ain't a big attraction for me.

But your comments have provoked a serious desire to see the man at work.
Will stop in some time when I'm passing through Tokyo.

Cheers,
 
Levi, sorry....poor choice of words on my part.

i can appreciate the recognition of a standard of excellence that you shared here.....and i appreciate it (in it's culturally embedded forms) on a daily basis. even gas stand attendants here in kyoto perform their duties with amazing attention to detail. i just thought the nyt article was a space filler....with no real reason to be in the first place. the "science" did not move me at all, and your follow up information confirms that. anyone who reads and agrees with that article probably doesn't share much appreciation for the beauty of craftsmanship and innovation in the first place. agreed, it is an injustice to the master, but the writer is simply a dweeb....and that indeed reflects poorly on nyt as well.
 
There is a man who wakes up each morning in Japan and takes extreme care in his choice of collar (a habit he picked up from his father, who agreed with their German friends that it was barbaric to have a collar permanently affixed to one's shirt), braces and buttons. He then proceeds to attend each and every board meeting he has been invited to, where he writes notes in shorthand for his assistant to transcribe on the same day. He typically proceeds to have a long lunch with fellow directors (if time permits), or business acquaintances passing through his adopted home of Tokyo. He does this almost every day, and has been doing so for the last twenty years.

Form fetishisation is fine, and I find the chanoyu parallel apt. Taste doesn't matter in the latter, at least not as much as all the other elements of form.

And I admire your particular dedication, that's all.
 
Asimov added some fuel to the fire in his blog posting today, asking whether the hard shake might have originated with Henry Charles Ramos, creator of the Ramos gin fizz.

No mention of starting liquor temperatures, though, and he seems to be speaking more to proper emulsification of the egg white rather than creating a particular texture from liquor alone.
 
I really enjoy reading Asimov's blog posts in general, so this was a nice bonus, as I thought it would be longer before I saw another one (as I believe he is on vacation). I guess I would just point out that Mr. Uyeda's shake is not a long shake in terms of length of time, as the shake required for a Ramos Gin Fizz is. Mr. Uyeda's process is actually fairly compact. Much more so than what occurs at Y&M Kisling Bar when Mr. Yoshida shakes a cocktail, for instance. I bring this up because I saw Mr. Yoshida effectively shake a drink with both lemon and milk in it, and the milk didn't curdle. Yoshida's shake is somewhat horizontal and lengthy in duration (and viewable here), Mr. Uyeda's is more 45 degree-ish and confined in time. Mr. Uyeda's is also a harder shake (as you might expect). Mr. Uyeda's is similar to what is practiced at Star Bar.

None of these is really similar to what happens when John Gertsen or Jackson Cannon (acknowledged Ramos Gin Fizz makers, both working in Boston) shake a Ramos Gin Fizz. I know this because I used to go and have a Ramos Gin Fizz at Gertsen's once post of No. 9 Park quite regularly, back when I lived around the corner. And I had one at Eastern Standard the last time I was in Boston, and that particular drink took about 20 minutes to arrive after I ordered it.
 
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