The Bar
Visited 2/27/2026 @ 6:30pm.
The Drink
Hatozaki. Hatozaki small batch whiskey. $10.75.
I practically had to pull the bartender's teeth to get him to recommend me a drink - "We don't do dealer's choice, we do customer's choice" were his exact words - but after much haggling and some very leading questions about what would be appropriate to drink with sushi, eventually I got my whiskey. I don't really have an appropriate category for this drink: Hatozaki is sipping whiskey, so this isn't a shot, but as straight whiskey, it feels weird calling it a full-fledged cocktail. Well, it came in a
rocks glass (mainly because they didn't have anything else to serve it in), so a cocktail it is! Hatozaki has gotten mixed reviews, for being
overpriced, on the
light side, or simply being
unremarkable; I liked it, even though I agree with the comments that it wasn't really anything special and I wouldn't recommend it over other Japanese whiskeys if you had to pick one bottle in a liquor store. We also had a few rounds of
Bushido and
Snow Monkey sake; I do actually recommend the Bushido, which was surprisingly good for canned sake.
The Crew
Notes
The first stop of the night was the old Hi Hat location. I really liked Hi Hat, a really distinctive restaurant/live venue/craft beer joint that felt like a neighborhood institution, and I was bummed that it
closed in summer 2024 when they couldn't recover from the lengthy and expensive repairs the space required after suffering damage from our various recent winter storms. Max's has been in the space for about five months after relocating from their old location up north, but they still seem a bit unsettled. Half a year is a long-time to still be experiencing opening-night jitters, but almost every aspect of the experience felt slightly discombobulated to a degree - the lengthy drink-ordering process described above, the incomplete glassware, the parade of confused DoorDashers wandering in trying to pick up their orders from the bar kitchen, the abandoned half-installed sake taps next to the bar... Even the music required some assistance from me, but that turned out to be for the better, as I am happy to report that I have now gotten Skee-Lo's immortal 1995 hit
I Wish played at not one but two different Sixth Street bars.
I would be remiss for not discussing the food here in more detail; despite what I said above about this bar still seeming in shakedown mode, their food is an excellent deal. They have big chicken katsu fingers, delicious garlic ramen plates, hefty sushi rolls, and each item is only like $5. We were sharing plates and left full for what felt like no money. Highly recommended, especially if you are eating because you need a buffer against the next round of drinks, which we were...
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