Imagine going into an English pub and slapping a tenner down on the bar. ‘All I can drink, please,’ you say. ‘Certainly sir,’ says the barman. ‘You’ve got two hours.’ ‘Right then,’ you say. ‘I’ll start with a pint.’ Ten minutes later: ‘Whisky, please, no ice.’ Shortly afterwards: ‘I think I’ll have a Bloody Mary.’ Then: ‘Pint of that there. The green one. Please.’ Shortly afterwards. ‘Large white wine.’ And so the night wears on. You can have absolutely anything you like: cocktails, double G&Ts, rum and coke, Jack Daniels and Jack Daniels. Two hours is enough to render you senseless. You have drunk the equivalent of £100 of booze for £10, and you need a taxi, a chicken fajita and an urgent visit to the toilet.
This fantasy is of course impossible, since any participating pub would go bankrupt in the first week. But in Japan, this is exactly the situation that the wide-eyed tourist encounters.
This all-you-can-drink phenomenon is called nomihoudai, and typically costs from £9 to £15 for a set period – usually 90 minutes, but sometimes as long as three hours. Beer, wine, spirits and cocktails are all available, as well as Japanese rice wine and the potato-based spirit known as shochu, which is used as a mixer. All you need to do is finish your glass, and a new drink will be brought to you. Nomihoudai is often paired with tabehoudai, or all-you-can-eat, probably because people who eat while drinking consume less drink. Recently I went to an all-you-can-eat-and-drink place and the bill was £17.50 per person.
Why does this work? I asked my friend Koi-san, who is a bar owner in Hakodate, Hokkaido (the freezing northern island of Japan). Koi-san cooks delicious tavern meals such as mabodofu (pork and tofu), whale soup and so on. He specialises in whale, in fact, and serves three types: minke, iwashi and tsuchi. His favourite band is the Jam, although he also likes the Damned, the Clash and slightly more obscure 1970s punk groups such as the Slits and the Members.
‘I hate all-you-can-drink,’ he says. ‘I wish it didn’t exist. But if I didn’t offer it, no customers would come here.’ His bar is a mid-sized, mid-range establishment, and all such establishments are more or less forced by economic realities to provide an all-you-can-drink option. ‘When customers come through the door I look at them and see if I’m going to make a profit,’ he says. Young people drink most, and drink beer, which is the most expensive for him.
‘I hate all-you-can-drink. I wish it didn’t exist. But if I didn’t offer it, no customers would come here’
But all-you-can-drink works, just about, partly because alcohol is ridiculously cheap. In Japan, booze is sold in the chemist, right next to the aspirin. Whisky is sold in ribbed plastic tubs for around £5 per litre. Wine is sold for around £2.50 a bottle. Think of a bottle of Yellow Tail, for example, the plonk that you can find in any UK corner shop for about £7; in Japan the very same bottle of Yellow Tail chardonnay is sold at nearly one third of the price. Someone in the UK is making a killing.
And there are other socio-economic and cultural reasons the concept works in Japan: some people don’t drink alcohol, but they come to the bar with their colleagues and pay the all-you-can-drink price just to nurse a mocktail and watch their superiors get wasted. Another fact on Koi-san’s side is that in a town like Hakodate there are fewer and fewer young people. The place is depopulating itself: his customers now tend to be over 50, they drink less and they drink cheaper drinks. ‘Nihonshu (sake) is as expensive as beer,’ says Koi-san, ‘but they take longer to drink it. Beer goes down quickly.’ Finally, all-you-can-drink is so culturally ingrained that customers don’t regard it as an extreme sport, as we might in the UK. They regard it as just part of a night out, and may drink in moderation, having just a couple of glasses and a chat with friends.
But even with all of that, it’s a challenge. ‘If I didn’t have to have all-you-can-drink I would make more money,’ says Koi-san. ‘The high-class establishments, ones with a star, ones who charge high prices, they don’t have it, of course. But we have to have it to survive. All owners of small restaurants feel the same way.’
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