Martiniburger. It's a great name for a restaurant. Even before you arrive you can picture it in your mind: As sleek as a cocktail lounge, with subtle lighting, cool music and even cooler people tucking into prime patties of best beef. And you wouldn't be far wrong.
Except for one detail: You visualize it in one of Tokyo's ritzier districts — behind the boutiques of Omotesando perhaps, or in upwardly mobile Azabu-Juban. Instead you find yourself trudging away from the bright lights of Kagurazaka, down to the unfashionable, unheralded slope known as Watanabezaka.
The short stroll is absolutely worth it, though, if only for the double-take when you get there, the frisson of disbelief when you spot Martiniburger for the first time. If you arrive in the evening, as we did, you see it gleaming like a beacon, as if it had been beamed down into this modest, traditional neighborhood not from another part of town but all the way from the hippest heart of New York City.