Serving homemade bread and wine the Ahiru store is always near capacity. Outside of the building and lining the windows are many bottles of wine. Similar to the outside, the interior is not flashy, but this makes it an easy atmosphere to enter. If you come across the store during the day it looks as if it is a long abandoned restaurant. But as night rolls around this shop is transformed, containing energy and warmth you can’t find in many Tokyo restaurants.
This store is operated by a friendly brother and sister pair, and it is best to ask them for their recommendations for your course of drinks or food. The famous magazine Brutus, known to be an authority on Tokyo food and lifestyle, has featured this store in multiple issues. More grassroots ratings on the internet are also high. Once a restaraunt has achieved success there is a tendency to expand quickly. In doing so, the flavor of the store is \ both literally and figuratively lost. Ahiru could easily have expanded, but for years they have stuck with the small and warm space in the back of Shibuya. Contrast this with the front side of Shibuya which is filled with the many chain stores that started small and expanded throughout the country.
In Tokyo sometimes you can go an entire day without having glimpsed the sun. Living here or in any big city many feel lost in the darkness of the world. Like a moth when we see a bright light our animal instincts draw us to warmth. This so called “light” is different for each person, for some it is food, for others drinks, and many others it is either a place or even certain season. Wandering around the easily confused streets of the Oku-Shibuya neighborhood for the first time I came across the nighttime atmosphere of Ahiru. In Tokyo, a crowded city where you can paradoxically sense the large distance between each person, I found my light not only in this store but in the entire neighborhood itself.
Name: Ahiru Store
Address: Tokyo, Shibuya-Ku, Tomigaya 1-19-4
☎︎: 03-5454-2146
Hours: Monday to Saturday 18:00pm～0:00pm Closed Sundays