Sake Bar Decibel
Bon Yagi ran a karaoke basement on East 9th Street, refitted it as Decibel in 1993 and poured whisky and beer. A bottle of Koshi No Kanbai from Niigata turned it into a sake bar, and it has been pouring off that list since.
Why go
Yagi had opened Hasaki, an Edo-style sushi room, up the same street in 1984, and he took the lease on the underground space at 240 East 9th by the middle of that decade (PUNCH, April 2019). The sake came after the Niigata bottle. It did not take off quickly, which Yagi told PUNCH is exactly when most operators change course and he did not. What he ended up with was sixty or more of the best sakes then being exported from Japan, filed under words like daiginjo and yamahai that PUNCH says were unfamiliar even to many Japanese drinkers at the time. The route in is the same as it ever was: an ON AIR sign above a flight of stairs, a buzzer, an unmarked door, a maneki-neko behind a low bar and graffiti over every surface.
Order this / avoid
- Order: sake, off the list, and ask what has come in. That is the whole reason the room exists.
- Order: the takowasa, raw octopus doused in wasabi, and keep the food to that scale.
- Order: the Lychee Martini if you want the house curio; a former manager's claim is that this was the first bar in New York to pour one.
- Avoid: arriving as a group. Tables go fast and the room is small.
What locals & experts say
- Besha Rodell, a longtime restaurant critic, on the room she drank in through college, quoted in PUNCH:
These aloof, insanely attractive punk-rock Japanese kids seemed to be running the place.
1 - The Infatuation (20 November 2017) called it a graffiti-covered cave of sake and one of the coolest and most unusual rooms in the city.2
Good to know
- Timing: evenings and late.
- Booking: walk in. The door at the bottom of the stairs is unmarked and you ring the buzzer.
- The gap: nothing independent about this bar is newer than 2019.
Verdict
should-visit — Bring one person and settle in for the evening. Order what you cannot pronounce.