For the past few years, the Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco’s Japantown has hosted Sake Day, the largest celebration of its kind outside of Japan. The event was founded in 2004 by Beau Timken, the owner of America’s first sake store, True Sake in San Francisco. Over a thousand sake enthusiasts attend from around the world to test their skills at blind tastings, and celebrate through large bottle pours, and even sips from silver bowls of sake overflow, as is traditionally done from the wooden sake boxes called masu in a symbol of generosity. This past October, Den Sake, Sequoia Sake, Sawtelle Sake, and Nova Brewing Company were all participating vendors at Sake Day, stepping away from their steaming warehouses and distribution routes to connect with sake drinkers. Equally, it’s a chance to celebrate the abundance of the growing sake community, in California and abroad. One can’t help but imagine that room filled with the spirits of the Japanese American laborers and dreamers that came before them, cheering them on.
California’s Best Sake Tasting Rooms
At Sequoia’s brewery and tasting room in the Apparel City neighborhood of San Francisco, you can choose from a variety of educational flights, including their signature sakes, wine and bourbon-barrel-aged styles, and sakes infused with local wasabi, jalapeño, and habanero, paired with a rotating menu of Californian snacks like salmon poke, local Cowgirl Creamery cheese, or their homemade Japanese pickle plate.
Umami Mart, on the border of Temescal in Oakland, has been owned and operated by Yoko Kumano and Kayoko Akabori since 2012 and offers sake education, bottles and tastings, as well as Japanese house, bar, and glassware brands for sale. All four breweries have been profiled in their American Born Sake (ABS) blog entries and they sell and ship Den Sake.
Seats at two-Michelin-starred Commis can be hard to come by, but its New-American “open-kitchen experiments” from chef and owner James Syhabout are an excellent pairing with Den Sake, regularly featured as a beverage pairing.
The ROW DTLA bottle shop Flask & Field, owned and operated by Miriam Yoo, has an impressive selection of natural wine and unique craft spirits, such as Mexican corn liqueur, artisanal sojus, and green tea gin from Kyoto. They also host tastings and classes and sell a variety of Sawtelle Sake’s freshest offerings.
Chef Avner Levi’s West Adams pasta bar Cento features Sawtelle Sake’s Pink Can, a sake-yuzu-hibiscus blend, as its go-to aperitif, paired with seasonal starters like grilled octopus, steak tartare, and an endive caesar salad with bottarga.
Madeleine Mori is a Japanese American writer and editor, born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poems and personal essays have appeared in the American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. A 2021 Margins Fellow through the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, she is the Assistant Director of the MFA Writing program at Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in Brooklyn.
