Address Kanagawa-ken, Kamakura-shi, Hase 2-7-15 Opening hours Open from 12 PM to 21 PM, closed on Wednesdays Map - See directions Telephone - 0467-25-4335 Menu - In Japanese and German Credit Cards - Yes

I had heard much about this restaurant and its eccentric owner, a middle-aged but still feisty German lady. Both have long been Kamakura mainstays, and it shows: while from the outside Sea Castle, sitting right next to the beach in Hase, looks like a Californian 24-hour breakfast joint, inside it's more like a German beer hall that surely must have known better times.

I shit you not, the walls are covered with newspaper and magazine clippings from the '50, '60, '70, '80 containing reviews of Sea Castle. In later years she must have come to the conclusion that it was futile collecting more.
She serves the customers and seems to enjoy surprising and scaring them with a most un-Japanese straightforwardness while talking in perfect Kamakura dialect, and according to Kamakura blogs she won't give you a beer if in her judgment you've had enough already.

Sea Castle serves German beer on tap, and that’s good.
The food is where we start seeing the first serious problems. In spite of the two German cooks in the kitchen, the roast potatoes were already a day old and the roast pork had been reheated, so it was a little dry. The sausages with sauerkraut were good, but surely they came from a plastic bag. The beets were OK, but they were just beets, for Christ's sake. More than anything else, the food gave a general impression of neglect.

Nothing was all that great either of the two times I ate there, so, if you consider that the place is quite out of the way (a good half an hour of foot from Kamakura station. You can also get the Enoden to Hase) and not particularly cheap, I cannot help but wonder if it isn’t wise to go somewhere else.