Hideaki Sakai doesn't make it easy to find his diminutive premises. Hidden on the second floor of an anonymous building on a quiet backstreet on the "wrong" side of Shibuya, it is invisible from the street. You access it through an unmarked door next to an offal specialist grill, up a steep flight of stairs that seem to lead nowhere.
You will not be the first to hesitate at the bottom of those unpromising steps. But this is intentional: Sakai Shokai is not a place you are meant to stumble into by chance. If you're not with someone who's been there before, you need to call ahead and then try to navigate your way there. That's what makes it special.
Sakai first wet his feet as a chef while living in Australia, where he picked up his good command of English. Once back home, he immersed himself in contemporary Japanese izakaya culture, first at the (now-closed) Zetton; then at Shibuya's dynamic and ever-popular Namikibashi Nakamura; and finally a short spell at the equally hard to find (and impossibly hard to book) Kotaro.