A note on the words: an izakaya is a Japanese pub, where you drink and order dishes to share as you go. Hamaguri is a large hard-shell clam, grilled in its shell; edamame are young soy beans in the pod; ankimo, here the liver of the monkfish, is steamed and served cold with ponzu, a citrus-and-soy dressing; hokkigai is the surf clam, served raw. Kinmiya is a shochu, the clear distilled spirit that Tokyo drinkers cut with tea or soda. Prices are as of this writing (August 2026).
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Sakagura Kandakko 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. I had a bit of business in Ueno, and once the business is done you cannot very well go home without a drink, can you? So I went into Kandakko — close at hand, and somewhere I had never got round to. The house rule is two food orders per person.
Honestly, if you are going to set a rule at all, I would rather it were a minimum spend than a minimum count (I do not eat much).
Five thousand yen, ten thousand yen, something along those lines.
Beer first.
Shops with a minimum order count usually turn out to have drinks priced dangerously low.
As it happens beer is about 500 yen a glass, which is ordinary enough for this part of town.
Edamame — what you always end up ordering when you feel obliged to order something.
Small grilled hamaguri clams. Bite-sized, easy to eat. Shellfish is good more or less wherever and whenever you eat it.
Looking at the menu, the seafood side of it was remarkably long and looked very good.
The grilled hamaguri were spot on, so I ordered raw shellfish as well — and how fresh it looked. One bite: no off smell whatsoever, plainly fresh, full of savor. Well now, this is a hit. So it was a good seafood izakaya after all.
Monkfish liver. After all that shochu with tea I wanted to take on something richer.
So: if you are dropping in mainly to drink, the two-dish rule may pinch a little. If you have come to settle in and drink properly, it will suit you well. Plenty of shops care about turning tables and would rather you ate up and left; here the style seems to be the opposite — stay a while. It is interesting that the shape of a place changes with the sort of custom it gets. Ueno, of course. I shall come back when I have time.
Sakagura Kandakko (Izakaya / Keisei Ueno, Naka-Okachimachi and Ueno-Okachimachi Stations)
Tabelog lunch rating ★★★☆☆ 3.3
I ate here and paid for it myself. Nothing on this site is a comped meal.
One more for the road?
