Why you should experience Casa De Sarasa in Tokyo, Japan.
Casa De Sarasa is a convivial Mexican restaurant where Dogenzaka's music culture, DJ Sarasa's attachment to Mexico, hand-pressed corn tortillas and agave spirits bring the conviviality of a Mexican table into one of Shibuya's principal nightlife quarters.
Set along Bunkamura-dori near Dogenzaka and just steps from Shibuya 109, the second-floor restaurant wraps a compact dining room in Talavera tiles, Mexican textiles and hand-painted floral and animal imagery created by Mexican artists Javier Rodriguez and Ana Muños. Corn tortillas are pressed individually in-house for a taco repertoire spanning fifteen varieties, keeping masa at the center of a menu that moves through street food, grilled meat, cactus and chile. More than sixty tequilas and mezcals extend Sarasa's years of travel in Mexico into the bar, with agave sharing the table with Mexican beer, margaritas and nonalcoholic horchata. The result is a Dogenzaka restaurant where music, Mexican craft and food designed for sharing carry Sarasa's relationship with the country directly into Shibuya.
What you should know about Casa De Sarasa.
Casa De Sarasa is best known for opening on May 16, 2017 after Tokyo-born, New York-raised DJ Sarasa fell for tacos during her international touring career and decided to build her first restaurant around the Mexican food culture she encountered repeatedly on the road. Osaka-born opening chef Kazuyoshi Yasuda arrived after working as manager and chef at Bokoku Kaiten Tori Ryori and spending six years pursuing Mexican cooking in Japan, giving Sarasa an experienced culinary partner for the Dogenzaka debut. Mexican artists Javier Rodriguez and Ana Muños traveled to Japan to hand-paint the interior, surrounding custom furniture, Talavera tiles and textiles with flowers, animals and a corn-centered Ojo de Dios composition derived from Huichol craft. Sarasa's connection with Tequila Festa brought another circle into the project: Luna Sea guitarist Inoran and Exile Üsa selected tequila flights, joining a drinks program built around the spirit she had studied during her Mexican travels. Her culinary work deepened after the opening through repeated returns to Mexico and kitchen experience at Enrique Olvera's Pujol in Mexico City, undertaken with restaurateur Edo Kobayashi before the pair later collaborated on Rubia in Shibuya. Casa De Sarasa remained the starting point, translating a DJ's international career into a restaurant where Mexican cooking, visual art and music entered the same Dogenzaka room.
The fifteen-taco selection begins with corn tortillas pressed in-house, bringing the aroma and texture of warm masa beneath fillings designed to move across meat, vegetables and seafood. Elote coats grilled corn with mayonnaise, chile powder, lime and cheese, pushing sweetness toward acidity, salinity and heat before nopales introduce cactus through a fresher register. The hand-roll taco set borrows the communal mechanics of temaki sushi, sending hot fillings to the table in a cast-iron skillet for diners to wrap themselves in tortillas with salsa roja, árbol and verde. Jalapeño poppers filled with two cheeses bring a crisp, chile-driven interruption before Mexican jambalaya moves the meal toward seasoned rice. Tequila flights selected by Sarasa, Inoran and Exile Üsa shift attention toward blanco, reposado and añejo bottlings, making differences in aging part of the development across the bar.
How to fold Casa De Sarasa into your trip.
Casa De Sarasa works as the dinner destination within a Dogenzaka route connecting the fashion building that redirected Shibuya's pedestrian traffic westward, a century-old entertainment quarter born after the Great Kanto Earthquake and the hill whose clubs helped establish Shibuya as a major center for Japanese music culture.
Begin at Shibuya 109, opened in April 1979 as Fashion Community 109 after Tokyu spent years assembling a difficult triangular site occupied by wooden commercial buildings. The eight-story project drew its numerical name from to and kyu in Tokyu, exceeded its initial ¥10 billion annual sales target and reached ¥14 billion in fiscal 1980, helping pull pedestrian traffic toward Dogenzaka after commercial momentum had shifted toward the Seibu and Parco side of Shibuya. Continue to Shibuya Hyakkendana, whose development followed the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake as Shibuya expanded into an entertainment district of cinemas, restaurants and performance businesses. The enclave later became intertwined with the surrounding Maruyamacho entertainment quarter, preserving a smaller street pattern behind the major roads that transformed Shibuya during subsequent decades. Conclude along Dogenzaka itself, where Shibuya's expanding concentration of analog music shops during the 1980s fed a surrounding network of clubs and live houses across Maruyamacho and neighboring streets. Tower Records arrived in Udagawacho in 1981, Eurospace opened in Sakuragaokacho in 1982 and the wider station district developed into one of Tokyo's densest concentrations of music and independent film culture. Casa De Sarasa closes the progression farther up Dogenzaka with a fitting twenty-first-century chapter: a restaurant opened by an international DJ who turned years of performances and travel in Mexico into tacos, tequila and Mexican art in Shibuya.
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