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#Best japanese karaoke bar nyc windows#
Everything about it is transportive, from the creative décor (paper lanterns that look like windows dramatic flower arrangements and folk art sake barrels repurposed as washroom stalls) to the huge selection of sake and the really excellent food. If Midtown East can feel drab, characterless, and empty at night, the ultimate antidote is Sakagura, a sprawling izakaya that is “hidden” only in the sense that it’s in the basement of a nondescript office tower (there’s a small sign for it on the building’s exterior, though you might not notice it if you weren’t looking). To top it all off, the bar’s ideally intimate, dimly lit, and romantic, with a long and cozy vinyl banquette that sparkles subtly in the dark. There’s even an option that marries food and drink in one: the rum oshiruko - a warm, earthy, and sweet red-bean soup, spiked with rum and served with a side of mochi-wrapped ice cream. The miso wings are some of the city’s very best, the woody burdock-root fries are strangely addicting, and each of the four varieties of Hiroshima-style layered okonomiyaki is worth a try. The cocktails here are serious and exciting enough that owner Kenta Goto, a Tokyo native late of the Pegu Club, could get away without offering food at all, but the short-but-potent menu of small plates is just as big of a draw. It’s all just unpretentious and incredibly fun. Best of all, the place is vaguely sumo-themed, which means they play mesmerizing footage of matches and have a whole section of the menu devoted to chanko nabe, a variety of hot pot that tends to be part of the wrestlers’ diet. It’s laid-back and casual, but comfortable and classy, too - a perfect place to camp out (on tall stools at one of the big, high communal tables) for an entire evening, sipping “cup sake,” which comes in glass jars with metal pop-off tops (or shochu highballs, or beer, or even a brand of Japanese nonalcoholic beer called Hoppy) and grazing on reasonably priced, deceptively simple, perfectly prepared bar snacks like takoyaki (octopus balls), deep-fried skewers, and excellent karaage fried chicken. On a weeknight, this unassuming spot on the Lower East Side feels like an undiscovered gem.