Deliberately Lost in Translation

[elfs]

Izakaya?
Hosted on Flickr!. Click to enlarge.

The other day, while I was waiting for my bus at an unfamiliar stop. I looked across the street and spotted the sign shown at the left. While I was waiting for my bus, it nagged at me. It looked like just another bar, but another sign said, "New in Seattle! A Japanese Izakaya."

So I pulled out my laptop and typed it in to my dictionary. Only one word came up: 居酒屋 (いざかや) (n) bar; pub; tavern.

Whee.

Comments

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

Knowing some of the differences in connotations between British and American english, when these particular words are used, it doesn't seem all that daft.

We get variations over here, though without the special labels. There are pubs which have been effectively "Irish" for decades, and not the fake green paint and shamrock Irish. Similarly for Poland in some of the larger cities. But in England a word like "pub" doesn'y seem to have the negative image I sometimes sense from American media. In our soaps, it's a commonplace set; The Rovers Return, The Woolpack, tThe Queen Vic.

Perhaps its a hangover from the days of small houses, with nowhere to escape; no room for a den and nowhere big enough to entertain friends.

But if you said you were going to a bar fro the craic, I fear you might be misunderstood, even in Seattle.

[charleshaynes.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure exactly which of the possible points you're trying to make, but on the off chance you aren't familiar with the idea of an izakaya let me run off at the mouth a bit.

I would call an "izakaya" more like a "tapas restaurant" than a "bar." I like izakaya and take friends to them not for drinking as an end in itself, but as a place to get interesting japanese small plates that go well with sake. There are a couple of them here in the Bay Area, some of them are excellent. "Gochi" for example in Cupertino.