Shimokita's culinary shrine to the green stuff, Asa, ironically, was launched on the anniversary of Japan's WWII surrender and the demise of a plant cultivated here for centuries.
More than three years on, Asa—the name refers to hemp fiber—has been refurbished in various shades of green, with hemp cloth and warm wooden furniture, and also has entirely changed its menu. The food, all of which contains hemp in some form, is now not only novel but tasty.
Our tasty starter tipple—the hemp milk Space cocktail—contained no less than five different kinds of alcohol, though the ingredients were hard to identify. Not so the hemp milk-based kenchijiru soup (¥350) in which the textures and mild flavors of the konyaku, shiitake, gobo (burdock root), carrot and satoimo (potato) clearly came through. Combine the soup with rice, in our case the sticky genmai rice, and Asa will throw in an additional daily special to make a set (¥600). Richer in flavor, the gamodoki (fried fish cake) topped with a thick vegetable and dashi sauce (¥850) was a personal favorite, as was the Tori no Asaji Aki with a crispy hemp seed topping and a negi garnish(¥700), a rare but worthy exception to a largely meat-free menu. Asa's belief in the health benefits of a hemp diet is genuine, and friendly manager Shiota-san was once a vegetarian, so this is one dining spot where "niku nashi" ("no meat, please") need not confuse.
To finish, we nibbled on Asa's popular cookies (¥300), which are sweet sans sugar and have the perfect degree of crumbliness. These treats were a nice complement to the hemp beer (¥600) we were quaffing. Made in Niigata, one of the few places with licensed hemp farms and where, along with Hokkaido, amateur hemp harvesters are known to head in summer, this was simply the best hemp beer we have ever tasted. In fact, it was one of the best beers we've tasted for quite some time. Rich in flavor and mildly sweet, it can be drunk at room temperature and more than justified a second order, and another...
...while we browsed the literature and pocketed the perforated postcards available tableside. Books and magazines about the production and environmental and even health benefits of the multipurpose plant are available in Japanese and English, and make for an informative end to a pleasant meal at one of Tokyo's most interesting eateries.