Text by Peter Njoroge. Photos by Jeremy Lindenfeld.
There’s nothing unique about a beautifully designed, low-lit building filled to capacity with an eclectic mix of L.A.’s finest on a Saturday evening. A single seat at the corner of the bar illuminated by a neon orange light is available and I rush to grab it. To my left is an older gentleman with three empty glasses in front of him who seems to be in the “friends of the house” category – periodically someone on staff excitedly comes over to chat him up. To my right, a group of 20-somethings eat, drink, and plan their next rendezvous.
But here, there aren’t any wine glasses. No tall pints that people are sipping heady beers from or coupes garnished with citrus. Everyone is drinking sake poured into short glasses by bartenders who busily rush around to attend to every guest.
I grab a menu and take a look inside. It goes on for pages and pages. But unlike an exhausting, cryptic beverage list, it’s highly organized and filled with additional information about each sake. Major styles are defined and certain options are listed as introductions while some as further explorations. Wooden plates line a brick wall behind the bar with more seasonal options – all described in the same democratic fashion.
The term sake in Japan can refer to all alcoholic beverages but in America, it typically invokes the alcoholic beverage made from specific varieties of rice, koji, water and yeast, utilizing a specific technique where, simultaneously, starch is converted to sugar and sugar is converted into alcohol.
At Ototo and its neighboring restaurant Tsubaki – both joint ventures in Echo Park between Charles Namba and Courtney Kaplan – premium sake is the lingua franca. Opening in 2019, the Izakaya-style bar represents one of the flashiest landmarks for drinking craft sake in Los Angeles.
For Andrea Sung, the general manager of Tsubaki, whose role extends across the two spaces, the menu is, perhaps, a little less revolutionary.
“The funny thing is, first, we don’t really even think of it as such an educational place,” she said. “It was more just a demystification and utilizing the right terminology in a very accessible way.”
Sung asserts that the menu changes every day and represents the way that they feel they can best communicate the range of offerings with patrons. It provides a landscape where someone without a complete understanding of sake can land somewhere new, while also giving the staff a chance to guide customers.
“This is really how we think about it,” she said. “Here’s your earth and flowers, here’s your dry aromatics … some sake will absolutely taste like aged cheese and a little bit of dirt.”
“We want to start pushing the envelope little by little, and if the menu happens to also be educational, that’s good,” she continued.
Despite a surge in press coverage from national publications, misnomers and misconceptions coming from customers are a constant reality for sake professionals in Los Angeles.
“It’s almost like people playing telephone,” Sung said. “Next thing you know, they’re sort of putting all the cognitive pieces together without actually asking a lot about the very essence of it.”
Across town in Culver City at Harajuku Taproom, another Izakaya-style outpost for premium sake, guests can find similarly ambitious offerings of Japanese beer and premium sake with a different backdrop. Harajuku closes most nights by 8 p.m. and, contrastingly, natural light streams into the restaurant, illuminating and reflecting off bright red bar stools. Sumo wrestling may be on the two televisions above the bar and running into a family eating dinner together is no surprise.
For Zion Miller, an employee at the taproom, the love for premium sake is a family affair. His dad is a sake sommelier who worked for John Gauntner – one of the most famous sake professionals in the United States – at an upscale Japanese restaurant in New Mexico called Izanami. He described a transfer of knowledge and passion for sake that occurred almost naturally.
“I came out to Harajuku because it was a pretty familiar place, having lived in Japan for a while and my dad being a sake sommelier,” he said.
Like Sung, Miller believes that there are some educational gaps that customers in the United States are still in the process of filling in.
“A lot of what gets passed here as good sake at sushi places and stuff like that – which usually aren’t Japanese, too – a lot of the stuff you’ll find there is Futsushu,” he said.
Miller also described the wide variety of guests that make up the customer base at Harajuku.
“It’s super mixed, honestly,” he said. “There’s everywhere from Japanese people that come to find something somewhat familiar to anyone, really, people who just wanted to go find some sushi.”
“But within that, there are very few people that are well-educated on sake,” he continued. “But it’s starting to increase a little bit more. People will come in and say they want a Junmai.”
Like Miller, Akiko Yamagami, a certified sake sommelier who previously worked in the tasting room at Nova Brewing Company – the first and only sake brewery in L.A. County – helps comprise an industry of younger professionals looking at sake through a craft lens.
She described her magical moment drinking a spritzy, fruity Namazake called Kaze no Mori.
“I was blown away,” she said. “And up until that moment, my idea of sake is [that] it’s something my dad drinks throughout the year.”
“I think the image around sake was get drunk fast, meaning doing sake bombs with beer,” Yamagami continued.
But this incredibly limited perspective that some bring to the table can be problematic for sake professionals.
“If they’re used to having the one house sake, hot or cold, they think that’s the entire world of sake but they don’t actually know how big the iceberg is,” Sung said.
“And when in doubt, it’s like, ‘oh, yeah, I used to always get the house sake at my local Japanese restaurant, and I just don’t like it, you know?’” Sung continued.
James Jin is the brewer and co-owner of Nova Brewing Company, a venture he started with his partner Emiko Tanabe in 2019. Nova Brewing Company represents the only sake brewery in the Los Angeles area and is one of the roughly 20 breweries in the United States.
“I cannot speak for the country but for L.A., I think, for a long time, L.A. was stuck with sake bombs and hot sake,” he said.
“All the sake breweries in America, half of our job is education,” he continued. “Wine and beer, people have a general idea of what it is, what it tastes like. A lot of people even know what they like. But sake, a lot of people don’t know what they like.”
For Jin, sake occupies a kind of in-between space in terms of production that makes the beverage totally singular and helps also add to the layers of misconceptions in the United States.
Sung hints at an overextension that people tend to make between wine and sake.
“A lot of people want to equate wine with sake,” she said. “They try to define sake by wine terminology.”
“‘Oh, I like orange wine,’” she continued. “What’s the equivalent of that in practice?”
“What I found most intriguing about sake is you’re turning grain into this wine-like beverage,” Jin said. “And beer is coming from grain while wine is coming from fruit, but sake is coming from grain, but the end result is fruity.”
Prior to opening the brewery, he worked for Mutual Trading Company, one of the early craft sake distribution companies in Los Angeles connected to the Sake School of America, where he earned his sake sommelier diploma.
At Mutual Trading Company, he sold and poured sake across the city to high-end wine stores, Michelin-starred restaurants and even giant corporations like Whole Foods. In his experience, clients in Los Angeles bought sake for many different reasons.
“I really like this one brand called Sumiyoshi,” he said. “It’s a really old brewery that’s still making [a] very old style of sake using cedar barrels, and you can still smell that cedar in their sake, and I love that about them. And their labels look like something from 1960.”
“I would have some customers who just loved that label because it just looks ancient, looks old, looks like something from an old Japanese movie,” he said.
During the short time that Nova Brewing Company has been open, he has noted a shift towards deeper, more informed conversations about sake – primarily through the customers that come to Covina to visit.
“Before, we rarely got people who knew what Junmai Daiginjo was, but now I’m getting people who know what the terms are,” he said.
“In the beginning when nobody knew about us it used to be just locals,” he continued. “Local people are like 20 percent of our customers now. And 80 percent of our customers are people from all over L.A. County or Orange County just coming to taste our sake.”
But Jin doesn’t really have a desire to create a culture of sake experts. His goals are in a different place.
“Yesterday, I had a customer who joined us for our homebrew workshop. And she told me that she hates sake,” he said.“So, she took the class, came to our tasting room and tasted my sake and she ended up taking home like six bottles.”
“And that’s totally the most memorable customer for me,” he continued. “That’s my mission, from the beginning, is to get non-drinkers to get into sake.”