CRAFTROOM:
Technical and service skills from a science background
From No. 2 in the world to beyond.
- Part 1 -

It's been seven years since Ryu Fujii was runner-up in the World Class 2016 World Championships and three years since he went independent with CRAFTROOM, and although we've been following his exploits on Drink Planet for a long time, this is actually his first appearance on Bar & Interview. We asked him some in-depth questions.

writer：Akihiko Nishio　撮影：Naohiro Kurashina

Craft bars lurk in obscene and miscellaneous buildings!

Bartender Ryu Fujii chose an unexpected place to set up his own business, instead of Kitashinchi, where he had trained.

The Osaka Ekimae Building is a large, multi-tenant building with a restaurant area in the basement and office buildings on the upper floors, like the New Shinbashi Building in Tokyo, for example.

It is lined with sembero top-class standing bars and popular izakayas (Japanese-style pubs).

On the other side of National Route 2 is Kitashinchi, the largest high-end restaurant district in western Japan, but the clientele here are as extremely different as between Shimbashi and Ginza.

'Less than 10% of our customers come here on a fritz, not knowing that the restaurant exists. They don't even realise there's a BAR here (laughs).

'Originally, the shop was run by his wife (a former bartender who was active in the same year as him!) ) used to run the shop here. Then, as the owner, I rented it to another person, but he had to leave the shop because of the Corona disaster. ...... I decided to do it myself rather than just close it down, so we pre-opened at the beginning of September 2020 and officially opened on 26 September."

It took only less than a month from his graduation from 'BAR,K', where he was head bartender, in August of the same year to the opening of 'CRAFTROOM'.