Izakaya Ten

The izakaya is to Japan what the tapas bar is to Spain and the gastropub is to Britain: a place built on the belief that good drinks should be accompanied by good food. The drink here, of course, is sake, and Izakaya Ten has a long list of both cold and hot sakes, some potent enough to peel paint at ten paces. (We can't remember the name of the one we ordered, which gives you some sense of it.) Though Izakaya Ten is next to the terrific tapas bar Tia Pol and thus quite accommodating of a drinking-and-grazing night, we decided to have a full meal there by piecing together bites from across the menu.



Though we didn't know this when we ordered, our first two dishes both involved raw vegetables: asparagus with Japanese mayonnaise and little sandwiches made from mountain potatoes with shiso and plum filling. Both were good (we were big fans of the spicy mayonnaise), but together they made for a lot of crunching.

Thankfully, the next delivery to our table brought some textural variety: a simple but tasty bowl of edamame, a mori set of four different kinds of yakitori (we loved the chicken meatball, which was like an all-meat corndog, and the spicy shishito peppers), a perfect little piece of shrimp sushi, and a collection of spicy scallop rolls coated in sesame seeds.




After a long, maybe-they-forgot delay, we got our final dish, a plate of gyoza, the pork, garlic, and cabbage dumplings so popular in Japan. While not the most conventional dessert, it was delicious. And by this point, everything else had gone crooked as well.