My partner had won some tickets to watch Appropriate on Broadway starring Sarah Paulson. The show starts at 8, but we had to pick up the will-call tickets by 7:30. I saw this Japanese small eatery was nearby the theater on 46th St, and I thought this would be a decent restaurant to try out since there’s a lot of little things we can order. We were able to walk in on a Saturday evening at around 5:30 PM before it got busy.

Now that we’re back from Hawaii, we went to go see Sweeney Todd, a musical that was one of my favorites. Nearby, we decided to eat something quick and light, so we opted for izakaya. Sake Bar Hagi, according to their website, says it’s New York’s first authentic izakaya since 1985. I’m not sure what that really means, but we’ll find out. We arrived around 5:30 PM on a Saturday evening, and we were seated immediately.

We had to run errands around Macy’s, so this was a good chance to check out some restaurant that was fairly light and also didn’t have strong smells. We were able to walk in on a Saturday at 5:30 PM with no reservations. We noticed the menus had both skewers and hot pot as options. I saw that many people ordered hot pot with cotton candy on top, and we contemplated briefly but decided not to.

I was supposed to meet my partner the next block at Casa Enrique, but for some reason they mistook a Japanese restaurant for a Mexican restaurant and ended up here. They found it weird that there were no lines, whereas I went to Casa Enrique and encountered a line. Because Casa Enrique doesn’t take walk-ins and the line was getting rather long, we decided to just eat here, and to my surprise, it was a good substitute.

When people say Manhattan has practically endless restaurants, it’s quite true. There’s not enough time, money, and health to try all the different restaurants out there. For this visit into the city, we decided to go after yakitori since that was fairly close around the area we were at. We have had previously been to Torishin, a former Michelin 1-star, so I wanted to show my partner different yakitori places that were less upscaled.

The people behind My Name is Han opened a cool Yakitori place. On a Saturday, it was easy to get a table for 2. The zuke maguro is marinated tuna sashimi with fresh jalapeno sauce. The tuna was actually pretty good, and the jalapeno sauce has a nice kick to it. For the yakitoris: The skirt with shishito was pretty good. There wasn’t anything super special about it, but I really liked the flavor of the coal they use here.