The Lobster Dance

Part Two: A Belgian Beer Cafe in Ginza

I Am a Beer Snob
Located on the other side of the tracks and down the road several blocks from the Trattoria Ciao, Antwerp Six stood like a beacon, guiding me out of the yellow fizzy seas of national-brand beers and into the familiar harbor of Belgian beers.

My friends tell me that my beer-snobbery and microbrew obsession is one of my charm points, but the truth is that I never drank beer until I was about 23. (Yes, that’s only two years after turning 21, but think about how much beer the average college junior or senior drinks.) I blame the ubiquity of Keystone and Corona at university—tried them once, wrote off all beer as a result. (If only someone have given me a Fat Tire first!)

That all changed when I went to grad school. Your tastes change as an adult, not just out of losing childhood food-fears (peppers) and from exposure to new things (Ethopian food), but out of necessity and social situations. A summer at intensive Japanese school taught me to like coffee (necessity). Two years living in the land of microbrews and making friends who fully appreciated beer taught me to like beer.*

But only good beer.

When I call myself a Beer Snob, I don’t mean that I’ll snub a beer based on its price or that I won’t drink American beer. Rather, I’m a beer snob in the same way I am a post-grad “food snob.” Receiving a stipend meant I could afford to experiment with new foods, and, at the same time, I began to be able to taste (and loathe) excessive preservatives. (Now I cook nearly everything from scratch out of necessity, but that’s another story.) I wouldn’t bake a Betty Crocker boxed cake with canned frosting just to get my sugar fix any more than I would drink a six-pack of Natty Lite to get drunk. I’d rather pay for one piece of really good homemade cake for dessert or one really good oatmeal stout, preferably on tap, to enjoy with friends. I don’t like the taste of the preservatives in cake mix any more than I like the artificial carbonation in national-brand beers. To me, quality matters more than quantity. Six awful beers for the price of two delicious microbrews still leaves you with six awful beers and doesn’t even stimulate the local economy.

Luckily, there was plenty of good beer (and wine) in Michigan, and plenty of places to buy it. Local breweries like Bell’s, New Holland, Ann Arbor Brewing Company, and Jolly Pumpkin are well represented in the grocery stores in town, especially with four brew-pubs literally within two blocks of each other; beers of larger distributors like Young’s, Mad Hatter, and Sam Adam’s seasonals graced our parties as well. I developed a taste for cherry beers and stouts, and spent my last weekend in Michigan at the Michigan Brewers’ Guild Beer Festival, happily sampling all the cherry beers I could get my hands on to determine which was most delicious. (Bell’s Cherry Stout is my perennial favorite, but Kuhnhenn’s Cherry Panty-Dropper tastes like a cherry pie. There are plenty to try!)

Then I moved to Japan, where micro-brews are restricted to the point of near nonexistence due to some ridiculous laws that support the national brands at the expense of my palate.** The concept of asking for 生ビール at a restaurant or a bar (even a nice one) and getting whatever beer they have on tap (Kirin, Asahi, or Sapporo) is puzzling. Whenever I see imported Budweiser at the conbini or the import liquor stores I frequent, I want to punch whomever made that executive decision right in the face.

Antwerp Six

While I was wandering around Yurakucho/Hibiya/Ginza looking for lunch before my show, I walked past the Antwerp Six. “Belgian Beer Cafe,” read the sign. My heart skipped a beat. Since I was planning to meet a fellow beer-snob after the show, I decided to try to come back then. She, of course, was more than pleased at the prospect of real beer, and so we wandered around until we found it again.

Antwerp Six is a fairly classy place, and the prices of the food reflect this. Since we had both had large lunches, we just ordered some appetizers and decided to spend the bulk of our dinner money on delicious beer. There are, according to the website, 800 varieties of beer, including Chimay, Leffe, Stella Artois, Hoegaarden, and Duvel on tap. The selection of (imported) bottled beer is excellent: Duchesse de Bourgogne, Westmalle Trippel, Orval, and, my drink of the night, La Guillotine, in honor of Takarazuka’s current (well, perpetual) obsession with all things French.***

The beer is certainly not cheap. If you want to economize, I recommend sharing appetizers and having one high-alcohol content beer (La Guillotine is 9% for 330 mL). We each spent about 4000 yen there, but that was for an average of three quality beers a piece and four plates total of shared appetizers/entrees. The Belgian fries were delicious, though overpriced, at 600 yen (+50 yen for toppings) a plate. The omelet with octopus was a bit strange, but not bad. (I like octopus, but it’s not my favorite in tomato sauces.)

The atmosphere manages to be a good blend of classy and fun. It’s noisy, but Antwerp Six feels more like a restaurant than a bar: the wooden interior is sleek and elegant, the lights are not too dim, and the wait staff is friendly, though very busy, even on weeknights. We were there from about 8-11 pm, and it was bustling. It reminded me of the summer my friend and I were at Japanese school—going out on weekend nights to our favorite local bars for a White Sail and Japanese conversation. And so, at this oasis of Belgian beer, we toasted to reunions and friendship—and to finding real beer.
Belgian Beer CAFÉ アントワープシックス
東京都中央区銀座８-２-１　ニッタビル1Ｆ

Belgian Beer Café Antwerp Six
Tokyo-to Chuo-ku Ginza 8-2-1- Nitta Building, 1st floor.

Tel. 050-5815-6428

Hours

Monday-Saturday
Lunch: 11:30-14:00
Dinner: 17:00-22:00
Bar only : 22:00-28:00
Sundays and holidays: 11:30-24:00
Closed if the Nitta Building is closed.

Access

Map

The closest stations are the JR Shimbashi (JR新橋駅) (5-min. walk) or the Ginza Subway Station (地下鉄銀座駅), exit C1 (5-min. walk). The location is also a quick walk (10-15 min.) from Tokyo Metro (東京メトロ) and Yamanote（山手線）Hibiya Stations (日比谷) and Yuurakuchou Stations (有楽町).

Average price for a meal and drinks: 4000 yen
Accepts Visa, Mastercard, JCB, and other major credit cards.

Hot-Pepper’s review (Antwerp Six-specific)
Belgian Beer Café (This site is for all the restaurants owned by Belgian Beer Café and is not specific to Antwerp Six.)

Notes

*That is, because I do drink alcohol, I learned to socially drink beer. Grad students in Japan Studies are not known for forcing our microbrews on teetotalers.

**To be fair, the selection of local and imported wine is pretty good, and there’s lots of Japanese liquors (nihonshu 日本酒 and shouchuu 焼酎) to enjoy, but every time I hear about my friends back home going to one of the brew-pubs I love or hunting down limited release beers, I cry a little.

** This year, I have seen Casablanca (Vichy France and territories), The Scarlet Pimpernel (Reign of Terror), and Trafalgar (Napoleonic Era naval wars). This is to say nothing of the theatre’s frequent productions of the Rose of Versailles (pre-Revolutionary France).