“Have you eaten in isakaya before?” asked the waitress, all smiles and eagerness, little red T-shirt tucked into her black trousers, the wide, grey Thames pouring slowly past the window like lava, scores of shiny tables gleaming under spotlights, stainless-steel open kitchen sprawling down one side, and middle-aged ladies from out of town chittering with that special excitement day-trippers derive from eating inside a landmark (in this case the Oxo tower).

“I have indeed,” I said. “But not in this one.” Nor in one anything like this one. I have eaten in isakayas only in Japan. And even there in only one or two. During a whirlwind trip to Tokyo last year, I found time between life-changing sushi moments and deep-fried epiphanies to duck into one or two of the little pub-type fellows – isakayas – which hunker unexpectedly between skyscrapers, ramshackle wooden things sometimes, apparently forgotten for a thousand years, looking hospitable, ancient, spiritual, full of life, like something out of Monkey.

Inside them, I drank beer of awesome coldness from tiny glasses that disappear in a Western hand like small change, and ate skewers of bird meat proffered without language, since I did not share one with anybody in there. I was not always certain, in the dark interior, which bits of bird they were, but you know how purveyors of chicken nuggets always promise “100 per cent white meat”? Well, in isakayas they seem to promise, implicitly and by hundreds of years of tradition, quite the opposite.

There were chopped slashes of skin, liver, gizzard, heart, whole bollocks if you were lucky, things that crunched scarily and other bits that came off the stick with a reluctant twang (like a monkey prised from the branch). All of them rich and dense and glowing with umi from the slick of brown gack with which they are dressed on the grill. It’s a sweetish mirin and soy reduction, but I’m sure you could make it by mixing one part Bovril to one part cherryade, or, indeed, one part almost anything.

I never ate many of them, just half a dozen sticks – they’re straggly and sleek, not loaded like satay – on the way to somewhere else (or more often on the way to nowhere else and then back again, since I spent three quarters of my time in the city lost), and I never once found again a place I had enjoyed the previous day. As if they were so ancient and tenuous that they went up in a puff of smoke as I walked out of the door, or were flattened beneath the iron stomp of an office block.

“So then you know what isakaya is,” said the waitress, rousing me from my reverie. “It’s basically a place,” she said, turning to my friend Bridget because she had made the mistake of looking interested, “to have a drink, have something to eat, make conversation…”

“Make conversation?” said Bridget.

“Nobody said anything about making conversation,” said I.

“What if we don’t have anything to talk about?” said Bridget.

“Then just eat and drink and chill out,” said the waitress. “Isakayas are for chilling out.”

Then she gave us the “it’s like tapas” spiel you hear in so many oriental restaurants nowadays, which is such a shame when you consider that the Japanese were eating like this when the Spanish were still short and hairy, lived mostly on ham and lanced cattle for sport on hot afternoons…

This isn’t an isakaya, anyway. Or a Japanese tapas joint. You can’t treat it the way the Spanish treat tapas or the Japs treat yakitori because it isn’t anywhere you’re ever likely to want to be for any other reason than eating here. Unless you’re on the way up to the top floor bar to impress a girl with your corporate Amex, and then you should be rocketing past in the lift.

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