In Japan the First Drink and the Last Dish Both Have Names

A drinking night in Japan has a shape. Not a formal one, nothing anybody teaches you, but the opening move and the closing move are both so standard that they have names.

Nobody mentions this because to a Japanese person it is not a custom, it is just what happens. It only becomes visible when you take it somewhere else.

The Opening: Toriaezu Nama

Toriaezu nama is the single most-said sentence in any izakaya in Japan. It means roughly "a draft for now."

Six people sit down. Nobody has read anything. Somebody says toriaezu nama to the room, everyone either nods or does not, and a count goes to the bar. The beers land, the table does kanpai, and the night has started.

The reason this exists is practical and I have a lot of respect for it. A table that sits down and immediately begins studying a drinks list is a table that spends its first ten minutes silent and reading. Nothing happens. The energy that walked in the door leaks out.

Toriaezu nama skips all of it. It is a placeholder order, and everybody understands it as one. You are not claiming beer is what you want tonight. You are saying: get something cold in front of all of us so we can start, and I will make a real decision on round two.

It is also why a Japanese izakaya guards its draft speed so carefully. That first round is not the money order. It is the thing that gets the evening moving, and it needs to be fast.

The Closing: Shime

At the other end there is shime.

The character is 〆, and it means to close or tie up. It is the same mark used to seal an envelope. Shime is the dish that closes the night, and the job of it is carbohydrate.

You have been drinking for four hours and eating small salty things. What you want at the end is something warm and starchy to land on top of all of it before you go home. So: ramen. Or ochazuke, rice with tea poured over it. Or onigiri, or soba, or udon.

This is not dessert and it is not a second dinner. It is a specific structural position in the evening, and everybody knows when it arrives.

Every Region Argues About What Shime Should Be

This is where it gets good.

In Fukuoka, shime no ramen is close to obligatory. You drink in Nakasu, and then you find a tonkotsu place, and that is simply the end of the night.

In Sapporo they do something else entirely. In Sapporo, the shime is a parfait.

Not a joke. After drinking in Susukino you go and eat an elaborate layered ice cream parfait at one in the morning. The habit had existed there quietly for years, the word shime parfait caught on around 2014, and in September 2015 seven restaurants founded the Sapporo Parfait Promotion Committee to push it as a local food culture. It now has more than twenty member businesses, and late-night parfait bars have spread out of Sapporo to other cities on the back of it.

A city formed a committee to promote eating parfait after drinking. I think about that a lot.

What This Means Here

We are a drinks-led room, so the shape applies whether or not anybody at the table has heard of it.

Our ordering guide already tells people that ramen at the end of the night is completely normal rather than strange. This is the reason why. It is not us being casual about menu structure. It is a position in the evening that Japanese drinking has had for a very long time, and a bowl of ramen at eleven o'clock is filling it exactly as intended.

So: start with something cold and easy while you work out what you actually want. Eat small things for a few hours. Then close it.

The first round and the last dish are the two parts of the night you do not have to think about. That is the whole point of them.