Yopparai, a Sake Bar on the Lower East Side, Serves Just 30 - Hungry City Evan Sung for The New York Times Yopparai, a modest sake bar that opened in March, is a sort of speakeasy by happenstance. IT feels illicit, to be hovering here on the crumbly stoop of a Lower East Side tenement. Press the buzzer, and a voice, garbled, exacts your name. The doorknob clicks, and you blink a moment in the bright foyer, until a pocket door skids open and a figure in black, behind a curtain of ropes, beckons. But the payoff is no latter-day opium den with a slinky soundtrack and cocktails set on fire. Yopparai, a modest sake bar that opened in March, isn't playing hard to get. It is a speakeasy by happenstance, simply making the best of its awkward perch in a repurposed railroad apartment. No password is required, although a reservation helps, as there are only 30 seats. And the people who work here seem genuinely happy to have been found. Yopparai's husband-and-wife owners, Gaku and Christy Shibata, work the floor. Mr. Shibata, a Tokyo native and a sommelier, tends bar while Ms. Shibata, a Chinese-American and, by day, a financial executive at NBCUniversal, gracefully keeps guests from noticing how tight the space is. The chef, Junya Miura, is also from Tokyo. In lieu of bar stools are cushioned benches for two, with cabinets below for stowing belongings, each locked with a wooden key that you might mistake for a miniature cutting board. Everything is designed to unknot the mind: sake poured in doll-size cups, forcing you to sip; a cloudy undertow of jazz. Yopparai means drunkard in Japanese, and sake is the mission here, with food in a supporting role. This means small plates and rustic snacks, like quenelles made with deep-fried shrimp and black cod, soaking up dashi broth ($14), and charred chicken meatballs with a sweet scarlet varnish, four to a skewer ($6). Humblest, and most comforting, is oden, a stew whose long-simmered ingredients might include meaty black daikon; hard-boiled eggs, stained like old photographs; chikuwabu, a tubular, glutinous dumpling; mochi kinchaku, chewy rice in a jacket of fried tofu; and cakes of puréed and steamed fish whose composition it is better not to question ($15 for 5 items, $10 for 3). The bowl comes with a daub of mustard on the rim; stir it in and the broth goes from wallflower to dancing on the bar. Salted squid guts ($6) were famously pilloried in an episode of the game show "Fear Factor" in which Miss U.S.A. contestants were required to chug a thermos of the stuff. But note that those tangled translucent noodles are not innards, merely slices from the squid's body. The "guts" are in the accompanying sauce, which is made from the squid's liver. Think marine foie gras, and it will go down easier. (Then banish the memory with a chaser of voluptuous Wakatake Onikoroshi sake, also known as Demon Slayer.) The well-curated sake list spills over into the dishes. Wasabi stems are pickled in sake lees, the sweet-sour, umami-rich residue from the sake-making process ($6). King salmon is marinated in specially imported lees from Dassai daiginjo, in which half the rice kernel is polished away before fermentation ($13). For dessert, a precarious mound of shaved ice is drenched with a tart yuzu-saturated sake ($6). Be sure to dive to the bottom, where the sake has pooled under the ice, ready to crystallize your blood. At a certain point, a lightness of being takes over. You may find yourself slightly weepy over fragments of sea urchin, clinging to ribbons of raw squid ($9), or a scrambled egg slowly setting in a shallow clay pot, engulfing hunks of freshwater eel in a still-seething dashi broth ($18); or strips of Washu beef (a hybrid of Black Angus and American Wagyu) roasting on a hoba leaf over a brazier wrapped in rice paper ($15). It is hard to feel worthy of the negitoro, sublimely fatty, pale-ruby tuna chopped fine and tossed with curls of scallion ($18). But you must say a prayer for the dwindling bluefin. At Yopparai, you eat the way you drink, in tiny mouthfuls. And so the hours drift. You will not notice. Yopparai 151 Rivington Street (Suffolk Street), (212) 777-7253, yopparainyc.com. RECOMMENDED Assorted oden; ika no uni ae (squid sashimi with sea urchin); unagi yanagawa (freshwater eel with scrambled egg in dashi broth); negitoro (toro-scallion) sashimi; masu tofu; ochazuke (dashi broth poured over rice). HOURS Monday to Saturday, 6 p.m. to midnight. WHEELCHAIR ACCESS Entrance is up a flight of stairs from the sidewalk. The restroom is narrow and not equipped with a handrail.