Alcoholics Anonymous

This post is not titled alcoholics anonymous because I am an alcoholic. It’s titled that because I very well may be one by the time I leave here. What’s the one thing that can ruin a good night of drinking? The answer for most people is money. Drinking is expensive, and there is nothing more depressing than waking up to an empty wallet on top of your hangover. Go out to a club and you could be paying up to and beyond $10 for a beer and $20 for a cocktail.

Enter ‘nomi-houdai’. ‘Nomi-houdai’ is the solution to the alcoholic’s issue of money. It is the magnificent deal available in Japan that is ‘all you can drink’. Each place is a little different, but most range from $25 to $40. It usually includes everything on the menu. The only regular exception I have found to this is beer, which is sometimes excluded from the set price. However, for an extra $5 you can upgrade to the all you can drink beer option. It usually has a time limit of 2-3 hours, but some places are not strict on this, and will let you drink all night for that price. Heaven, must be heaven.

Now, I don’t want to excite you too much, but there is even a food version of this amazingness. It is called ‘tabe-houdai’. It’s the same concept as the all you can drink. You can get anything off the menu (most likely a selection of small dishes perfect for sharing), and it will be timed for approximately 2 hours. That is well and truly enough time to eat your way through an entire menu if you wish to accept the challenge. Although, my advice would be to only order what you can eat as Japanese people are very devoted to the concept of not being wasteful (as you may have noticed from the complicated garbage disposal system).

If you are a real bargain hunter, you may like to go for the ‘tabenomi-houdai’, which is, as you may have guessed from the name, a combination of the two above mentioned deals. This will set you back perhaps $35-$50, but it is most definitely worth it. Happy indulging!

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