A note on the words: akami is the lean red cut of tuna; negitoro is fatty tuna scraped and mixed with spring onion; uni is sea urchin; takuan a yellow pickled radish; kobashira the small adductor muscles of a surf clam; akagai an ark shell; yakitori grilled chicken skewers, and tare the sweet soy glaze they are painted with. Izakaya means a Japanese pub. Prices are as of this writing (August 2026).
Table of Contents hide
Isaribi Kaisen Kakurega on Tabelog (English) — opening hours, payment details and the Japanese address are kept up to date there, not here.
I want to eat something good today as well. This is Hangover Meshi. Somebody said “shall we go and drink a bit in Ikebukuro?”, I searched at random, and up came Isaribi. I walked there with the map open and could not find it at all — “where is it?” — and then, here, of all places. It seems several seafood izakaya brands share the one place. That is to say the basement is partitioned into four spaces, and each one has a slightly different menu, I think?
You would think splitting it into brands only makes more work for them.
Then again, dividing it up as “crab!” or “tuna!” may well bring in guests who book without having seen the place.
Inside it is a jumbled sort of izakaya, but for a light drink there is nothing at all wrong with it. Beer alone would have done, but we decided to order whatever sashimi caught the eye.
Ordering is by QR code. Handy, this sort of thing, these days.
Though even with the language set to Japanese, Chinese keeps turning up here and there. Ah — so that is how it is.
Bluefin, apparently! The akami, the lean cut.
Yes, well. It is ordinary tuna. Not bad!
Three kinds: whelk, akagai clam and kobashira.
Probably frozen and thawed as well, but again perfectly ordinary. If anything I am happy simply to be eating shellfish.
Yakitori! These were rather good.
Ready-made, I expect, but grill tare sauce and of course it tastes good.
Uni, negitoro and takuan!
This one is not so good.
The rice and the spring onion have dried a little at the edges, and the negitoro seems rather oily. A small dab of uni, with something caviar-ish on top. It is not that it tastes bad, only that the quality has not quite kept up. The nori is astonishingly pale and astonishingly thin — I did not know nori like that was sold.
The strongest thing on this menu is here.
This, honestly, was good. Order the spicy bean sprouts first.
So that was the evening. In terms of satisfaction, though: you can drink, the seafood selection is reasonably wide, and whatever the quality, you can eat seafood-ish things and drink hard and talk — on that measure it scored rather well. For those sudden “let us just go somewhere” evenings I might well use it again. Depending on what you want from it, a good place.
Isaribi Kaisen Kakurega (Izakaya / Ikebukuro Station, Kanamecho Station)
Tabelog dinner rating ★★★☆☆ 3.1
I ate here and paid for it myself. Nothing on this site is a comped meal.
One more for the road?
