Augusta Tarlogie

The back bar will have several hundred bottles, a good proportion of them things you will not have heard of: independent bottlings, single casks, closed distilleries, Japanese whisky from before the current shortage made it unbuyable. Faced with that, most visitors pick the most famous name they recognise, which is the one move guaranteed to waste the visit.

The right approach is to hand the choice over. Say what you have enjoyed before – a region, a style, peated or not, sherry cask or bourbon cask, or simply ‘something I cannot buy at home’. Say roughly what you want to spend. Then let the bar choose, and ask why it chose that, because a bar of this kind is a teaching room and the explanation is half of what you are paying for.

Drink it neat first and add water second, a few drops at a time, which opens the whisky and is not an insult to it. Ask for a chaser of still water. Two or three drams is a full evening and you will taste the third one considerably less well than the first, so order in ascending intensity.

The ¥8,000 to ¥9,999 band is a real figure and you should budget for it. A whisky bar charges by the pour and the pours here include bottles that cannot be replaced, so the spread between the cheapest and dearest dram is very wide. Ask prices before ordering. This is entirely normal, nobody will think worse of you, and the alternative is a bill that surprises you.

There is a cover charge, as at every Japanese bar of this class. Cash is wise. Whisky bars have thin margins on inventory that ties up capital for decades, and the pricing reflects that rather than the room.

What the money is not buying is spectacle. There is no view, no music programme, no food beyond something small to pick at. If the evening you want is atmospheric and cheap, Shinsekai will do it for a fifth of this and do it very well.

Tuesday is the closing day, and Osaka clusters its Tuesday closures in a way that catches people: the Museum of History, the Cupnoodles Museum and Harukoma all shut on Tuesdays too, while the National Museum of Art shuts on Mondays instead. There is no single day off in this city.

Come late and come second. This is an after-dinner room, not a pre-dinner one, and it works best at the end of an evening that started with kushikatsu or okonomiyaki somewhere considerably louder. Two hours here is the correct dose.

If it is shut, Bar Nayuta is the bespoke-cocktail alternative and Craftroom is the six-seat one, which is to say: book something.