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Tucked to the left of the main entrance to a Streeterville high-rise, a glass door hides amid floor-to-ceiling windows, one of which sports a neon flower sculpture illuminated by a dim light like the first edge of the rising sun. The sign is easy to miss and, once inside, you get the impression that’s intentional.
Café Shino (211 E Ontario St, 312-266-2280) remains perhaps the only Japanese piano and karaoke bar in the city and a well-kept secret among the city’s Japanese. It’s a relic of ’80s Japan, when the boom market flooded the country with money, and businessmen spent lavishly on bottle service and female company at bars like this after a long day at the office. One look at the soft-core porn–esque decor—mirrors, candles, neon—and it’s clear this place has been in business since that era, and its ethos hasn’t changed a bit.
Several young Japanese women in demure party dresses greet clientele (80 percent Japanese, 20 percent curious foreigners, 0 percent female) with “irashaimase” (“welcome”). This is a kaburaka (hostess bar) and the women serve, sit with, drink with and talk to clients for a “service fee” of $10 an hour at the bar or $20 per hour in the sunken karaoke lounge. (In an interesting reversal of American tradition, clients also buy drinks for the bartender and hostesses.) But before you get lost in geisha fantasies, keep in mind that these hostesses strictly make conversation; they mostly speak Japanese and almost exclusively talk to regulars, middle-aged Japanese businessmen living temporarily in Chicago or firmly assimilated in the suburbs.
“People come to talk about their family problems or talk about something to forget their family problems,” a hostess says. Another chimes in, “I think people are very lonely and tired from work. They are stressed out from speaking English all day and miss their family in Japan. They come here because they want to be with someone they can talk to in their mother tongue.”
The scene is serene: A group of three men who have taken their ties off speak quietly on sofas and several hostesses politely laugh. At an opposite booth, a man from Schaumburg talks with two young women, all of them drinking wine. The men watch one another’s liquor, as do the hostesses, who also drink, and pour for each other when any glass nears empty. While you can buy single drinks, bottle service is routine. (A “bargain” here: Wild Turkey at $95 a bottle .) Regulars drink from bottles of Scotch pulled from shelves beside the bar. (At the end of the night, the house labels each client’s bottle with his name in Japanese and stashes it for next time.)
About every hour, a patron cues the karaoke to Japanese pop music and gently and shamelessly sings. “When a man comes here and he is lonely, he will sing songs from when he was in college, in Japan,” says one client, a middle-age man from the suburbs. “The more lonely he is, the more he will sing.”
