Tokyo pub prohibits talking or keeping your phone out, only lets you drink in morning on weekends

There are a lot of hoops to jump through at Uchida, but is this 80-year-old pub worth the hassle? When the weekend rolls around, do you like meeting up with a friend and grabbing a drink or two? Hey, what a coincidence! So do we! And when you and your friends are choosing where to knock back a couple cold ones at, do you find yourself gravitating towards places that have a long, long list of rules for customers to follow? No? How about places that require you to get up vey early in the morning and start drinking before noon? Hmm…not so crazy about that either, huh? Well, in that case the Japanese pub Uchida , in Tokyo’s Tateishi neighborhood, might not be the place for you.

To be honest, we weren’t sure whether or not Uchida would be the place for us either, but despite its strict customer conduct codes and bizarre operating hours, Uchida has been in business since 1946 .

You don’t last eight decades in the restaurant business by pure luck, especially in a market as competitive as Tokyo, so we figured there must be something that makes it worth it to set an early alarm and navigate Uchida’s byzantine web of etiquette expectations , so that’s what we set out to do.

Let’s start with the schedule.

Even on weekdays, Uchida shuts down pretty early, closing at 7 p.m.

On weekends, though, the place is only open from 10 a.m. to noon .

That doesn’t mean you can just roll up at 10 and expect to get in, though.

Because of Uchida’s popularity, customers start showing up to put their names in the queue for seats long before the restaurant opens.

Some die-hard fans show up before 6 a.m., and when we arrived at 7, there were already more than 30 people who’d gotten there before us .

The Uchida (宇ち多゛) shutters are still closed in the early morning, but staff are stationed around the back of the restaurant to give out numbers to aspiring customers so that they don’t have to stand in line for the hours waiting to get in.

You don’t get a piece of paper or text message, though.

The staff simply tells you your number verbally, and it’s up to you to remember it.

They’ll also tell you what time you should come back and wait outside for your number block to be called, which in our case was 9:20 a.m.

So if you’re headed to Uchida on the weekend, you’re going to have some time to kill, which is actually good, because it’ll give you time to review the many rules the restaurant has.