“Patron is a phenomenal drink. It sells phenomenally well, grew phenomenally fast, is phenomenally well marketed and tastes like licking a plumber’s fingers.

The next time someone tells you it’s the world’s best tequila, poke them in the eye and tell them it’s not.”

Read more: Tequila: More than the drink of mere champs | CNNGo.com

“New rule: If you’re going to talk or write about the Park Hyatt Tokyo’s New York Bar, you have to do so without mentioning the movie. You know the one. Enough is enough. It’s been eight years.
Here’s a new, non-celluloid, and much better reason to like the place — next week the hotel is flying in four top mixologists from the United States to turn the New York Bar into a real New York bar for six nights.”

etc etc. Click the link to read it.

“Tokyo ought to rank somewhere between Lagos and Tehran for quality of life. It’s the focal point of the most populous conurbation on the planet, and is one of the most crowded cities. It’s often expensive, always cacophonous and, at first glance, ugly as sin. The tourist bureau likes to show pictures of cherry blossom and Shinto shrines, but the real icons of this city are grey boxy offices and salarymen being stuffed into rush-hour trains.
Yet Tokyo is consistently rated one of the world’s most livable cities, and rightly so. It may not be as pretty as Paris, Athens or Rome, but it works like nowhere else on Earth. Those commuters that ride nose-to-stranger’s armpit arrive at their destination unruffled and on time, then set about making this extraordinary city tick.
I’m writing this in a coffee shop whose owner says, in seriousness, that his skills are comparable to the lightsaber technique of Obi-Wan Kenobi. He says it takes five years to learn how to make a
cappuccino, and he refuses to serve espresso after 2pm because he says he has to share the power grid with too many other people so the extraction will be too weak. He’s perfect fodder for a quirky Japan story. But you have to take him seriously because his coffee is sensational.

etc etc blah blah blah.”

“How do you excite consumers when a key part of your retail proposition is a line-up of laminates, adhesives, filters and films? Multinational manufacturing conglomerate 3M’s response is its first-ever store – a dazzling design fest on Tokyo’s high-fashion Omotesando Boulevard.

As part of its 50th anniversary celebrations, 3M Japan is trying to boost brand awareness and is introducing new ways of using its products with its first global outlet.

On a Tokyo street synonymous with megabrand boutiques – in a space most recently occupied by cosmetics brand Shu Uemura – 3M has opened a pop-up store for the final months of 2010.”

And that’s all you get unless you cough up for a subscription.

Then Stylus hired me to write about the 75 most interesting or inspirational places in Tokyo, with a brief that gave me almost completely free reign. Here’s the result. Actually, here’s a tiny screen grab of part of the result, because it’s a subscription-only site and I’m guessing it costs a great deal of money to get in.

Stylus is the new B2B design site from Marc Worth. My first piece for them looks at the Pass The Baton recycle shops.

“Omotesando is Tokyo’s big-brand boulevard on which Louis Vuitton, Prada, Dior and many more have built architecturally dazzling flagship stores. Since April 2010 it has also been home to Pass The Baton, a shop that deals in used goods, dead stock and factory rejects.
Though founder Masamichi Toyama says he likes the perception gap between his “recycle shop” and the street’s luxury reputation, in truth Pass The Baton (PTB) is a great fit. The store gives second lives to products but markets them not as money-saving options for the thrifty, but as premium items for discerning consumers.”

“Fourteen years ago in a parking lot in the aptly named city of Lebanon, Tennessee, a gentleman who called himself Jellybean and claimed to have killed 26 people allowed me a swig of his homemade whiskey. His drink had a nose, palate and finish of ethanol. He may have forgotten to malt his grains, he may have been using an ill-proportioned still, or he may have been drinking ethanol.

Like Jellybean, I’ve always fancied myself as a boozemaker, but never had the skill or equipment to produce anything worth drinking. So imagine my delight when I tried infusing vodkas and found it as easy as stuffing something into a bottle and waiting until it tastes nice.

There are, as I write, bottles of homemade pepper vodka, perilla vodka and wasabi vodka on my coffee table. There’s a hops vodka and a banana vodka on top of my fridge. There’s a butter vodka in the fridge, a black truffle vodka on the sideboard and an ambergrease vodka on top of my wine cellar, but we’ll come to that later.”

etc etc. Click the link below.

An interview with Peter Bethune, shortly before his trial for boarding the Japanese whaling ship Shonan Maru 2.

‘Our interview takes place on the 10th floor. Bethune is brought into an interview room and we are separated by a glass wall, speaking through a grille. A burly guard sits directly behind Bethune, and a woman sits at a lectern next to him transcribing everything he says. We have exactly 12 minutes.
‘‘The media portrayed me as a terrorist, so . . . I had a hood over me, like I’m a psychopathic killer,’’ Bethune says. ‘‘It was the most bizarre experience. The ironic thing is that I went to a lot of trouble to get caught, and they’re worried I’m going to try and escape.’’’

“In January, Tokyo Walker magazine declared Korea’s rice wine the next big drink, saying that, like the highball, it’s cheap, relatively healthy, and proving popular with young women.

They’re right on all counts. Makgeolli sells for less than ¥500 a liter in Japan, is low in alcohol (5-7 percent), and its yogurty sourness comes from lactic acid, left over from fermentation, which science suggests can boost the immune system, lower cholesterol and reduce blood pressure. According to South Korean tax office figures, the drink is already a hit in Japan, with a whopping 89.6 percent of exported makgeolli heading here in 2008.

But the brew has an image problem. In its native land it’s also known by the nicknames nongju, wheju, chejuor takju, all of which connote hillbilly booze, and despite a history at least eight centuries long, it’s still usually sold in white plastic bottles at rock-bottom prices. While Japan’s rice brew became the drink of Shinto gods and emperors, its unfiltered Korean cousin has never been anything but hooch.”