A couple of months ago I went to a cocktail party with a friend. It was a house party, but the host treated us to an array of cocktails that were definitely not the kind you would expect in a house party. It tasted professional.

As the host catched everybody’s orders and such, I asked if by any chance I could have a grasshopper.

A person in front of me was fairly surprised with the name, imagining that it would be a drink with an actual grasshopper in it – probably something from Nagano prefecture, where apparently grasshoppers abound.

It was not the case, but it reminded me of the following story.

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I lived a significant part of my university life in Sapporo. Before the pandemic hit in 2020, some international students had a tradition of going to a certain student-run bar just outside the campus.

Chitlin was our watering hole, plain and simple. One of my best friends tended the bar on Thursdays, and this created a long-lasting tradition of going to the bar on Thursday night – this habit was so ingrained among our little international student community that the other bartenders, all Japanese, began calling it the Gaijin Thursday. It was, in the truest sociological sense, a third place, our little spot.

I lost count of how many drinks I had at that place before one of their new staff, in an act of sheer carelessness, set it on fire—tossing a still-lit cigarette butt into a trash bin filled with paper on a winter day in 2019. One of the stupidest fires I have heard about in my life.

Being student-run, Chitlin naturally had a reasonable all-you-can-drink cocktail option. So many times I crisscrossed the snowy roads of Sapporo winter nights to get a drink and meet friends. Most of the time we wouldn’t make plans, but we knew who would be there. Liquor blanket.

Grasshopper was my first drink of choice on most nights. I was a fast drinker– some things haven’t changed even now. Our Turkish friend who was bartending those family meeting-like Thursdays would get a smoke, and by the time he ended his cigarette I would already be at the counter again, asking for a refill.

It managed to recover from the 2019 fire, but as the pandemic hit in the following months in the beginning of 2020, it did not survive the financial hit and closed its doors in those dark times.

Chitlin is gone, but the memories remain—laughter, love stories, reasonable drinks, and that one hole in the wall, courtesy of a junior who had one too many.

All dearly missed.