A Short History of the Izakaya, From Tokyo Alleys to Here

Omoide Yokocho is an alley beside Shinjuku station in Tokyo that you can cross in two strides. Smoke, counters seating six, yakitori going over coals a foot from the customer’s face. It is on every Tokyo itinerary now. It began as a black market for offal.

Izakaya have a much longer history than that alley, and a much less romantic one than the lanterns suggest. It is worth knowing, partly because it explains why the format looks the way it does, and partly because it puts a useful floor under the word — an izakaya is not a style of decoration.

Before the alleys: a shop you were not supposed to stay in

The word itself is 居酒屋, from iru, to stay, and sakaya, sake shop. That construction records what happened: izakaya grew out of sake shops that let customers sit and drink on the premises rather than carrying the bottle away. The shop was the retailer. Staying was the innovation.

Sake in Japan goes back a great deal further — there is a record from the year 733 of rice being collected as a brewing-fee tax — but the full-scale development of izakaya dates to the Edo period, 1603 to 1867, and by the late 1700s sake had become a genuine consumer good rather than a ceremonial one.

Food followed the drink into the room, not the other way round, and that order of events is still visible in how an izakaya behaves today. We have written about what that means practically in the piece on how an izakaya differs from a restaurant and a bar.

1945: the alley that is actually a black market

The Tokyo alleys everyone photographs are much newer than the format, and they have a precise start date.

On 20 August 1945 — five days after Japan’s surrender — the Shinjuku black market opened for business. It was run by the yakuza boss Ozu Kinosuke and, at its height, involved over 70,000 shopkeepers and peddlers, with separate markets operating at different exits of the station.

At the west exit was a strip called Lucky Street: tiny outdoor stalls separated by sliding door frames. It later picked up the nickname shonben yokocho, which translates about as politely as “piss alley”, and it is the strip known today as Omoide Yokocho — memory alley.

Why the food was offal, and why it still is

This is the part that changes how the alley reads.

Under the controlled economy of the Occupation, the stalls could not get ordinary meat. What they could get was entrails and offal — the cuts nobody wanted from the cows and pigs being used to feed the Occupation troops. So that is what went over the coals: cheap protein, cut small, cooked fast, sold to people standing up.

Yakitori and motsu — offal — are not alley food because somebody decided they were characterful. They are alley food because in 1946 they were the only food. And the lineage held: today around half of the izakaya making up Omoide Yokocho still sell yakitori and motsu nabe, offal hot pot, in rooms whose recipes trace back to those stalls.

1949: the markets are cleared, and Golden Gai appears

The black markets were dismantled in 1949. The businesses from the east-exit Shinjuku market were moved into a row of houses about half a kilometre from the station — and that relocation is the origin of Golden Gai, now around 300 tiny drinking establishments packed into a few lanes, and a byword for the smallest bars in Tokyo.

So two of the most photographed drinking districts in Japan are, in origin, the same event: a postwar market being cleared, and its traders re-forming somewhere they were allowed to stay.

What actually carried through

Strip out the nostalgia and the through-line is fairly blunt. Across three centuries the izakaya has been:

Small. Counters rather than dining rooms; you sit near the cooking and near strangers.
Cheap cuts, cooked over fire. Not because fire is romantic — because it is the fastest way to make an inexpensive piece of meat worth ordering.
Drink-led, food-sustained. The kitchen exists to keep the evening going, which is why the plates are small and arrive in waves.
A room you are allowed to stay in. That was the original innovation and it is still the defining one.

And then, Hamilton Road

We are going to be careful here, because it would be very easy to write a paragraph implying we are descended from any of this, and we are not. Habibi-san opened at 55 Haji Lane in December 2020 and moved its flagship to 29 Hamilton Road in October 2025. We are a Japanese-Middle Eastern kitchen in Jalan Besar. There is no lineage to claim.

What we did take is the shape of the thing. There is an open charcoal grill in the room rather than behind a wall, and you can sit at the counter and watch it work. The plates are small and go to the middle of the table. Nobody is trying to turn your table over. The evening is allowed to be three hours long.

What we did not take is the offal, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise: our grill runs to pork collar, lamb, spatchcocked chicken, seabass and beef. Our small plates are as much Levantine as Japanese. That is a different menu descended from a different set of pressures, and the fusion post makes the case for why the two cuisines fit at all.

One structural echo is real, though, and worth pointing at. Li’l Habibi, our smaller room at 55 Haji Lane, operates inside a bar — our kitchen, somebody else’s drinks list, one room. Which is, functionally, a lot closer to a sake shop that let people stay than a dining room with a booking system is.

Booking, hours and the one dietary line

We are at 29 Hamilton Road, Singapore 209198, in Jalan Besar. Tuesday to Sunday, 5pm to 11pm, with brunch on Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 2.30pm. Closed Mondays. Book on Chope or through our reservations page.

Habibi-san is not halal. We serve pork and we have a full bar — the FAQ has the rest. For where the format lands in Singapore, our first-timer’s guide is the hub and the honest shortlist names other people’s rooms too. The otoshi post covers the one alley custom that still shows up on a bill, and the gallery shows the room this one ends in.

Sources

Etymology, the 733 tax record, the Edo-period dating and the late-1700s note: Wikipedia, “Izakaya”. The 20 August 1945 opening, Ozu Kinosuke, the 70,000 traders, Lucky Street and shonben yokocho, the offal explanation, the 1949 clearance and the origin of Golden Gai: Unseen Japan, “Shinjuku: The Birth of Kabukicho”. Both read 5 September 2026. Our own opening dates are from our published history.