Two narrow lanes, which turns out to be exactly the right size. Shizuoka's oden alleys — Aoba Oden-gai and Aoba Yokochō — are lined with small counters serving skewers simmered in a dark stock, handed across to you rather than carried to a table. The rooms are too small to spend an entire evening in, so the usual pattern is two or three doors in a night and then home, and even a first-time visitor finds it easy to say "shall we try the next one" without it sounding like a plan. The stock in each pot has its own history and nobody explains this either. If sitting very close to strangers is not something you enjoy, this is honestly not going to work for you. That closeness is also the reason conversation begins in a shop you have never entered before, without anyone having made an effort to start it.

Shizuoka station is walkable, and the Shinkansen puts both Tokyo and Nagoya within easy reach, so the lanes work perfectly well as a detour rather than as a destination in themselves. Many of the counters open early in the evening, which is a kindness to anyone travelling and short of time. The skewers are cheap enough that ordering wrongly costs you nothing.

The whole arrangement quietly rewards moving on rather than settling in, and the second shop is usually better than the first because by then you know how it works. Drinking that does not finish in one place is something the town itself has arranged. The stock is dark because of beef tendon and dark soy, and every pot tastes slightly different. The skewers sit in it all evening. That is the whole method. Take the second door as well, and probably the third.