To badly paraphrase an already bad Country-Western tune: "What made Akita famous (almost) made a loser out of me." Or, put another way, I've always liked sake but it hasn't always reciprocated. While living in Akita Prefecture back in the early eighties, I was force fed a lot of it. The area was justly famous for sake and in my capacity of language teacher (have English- will travel) and visiting something like 110 different Junior and Senior High Schools throughout the prefecture, I met a lot of people anxious to show off the local artisan brews, usually with the added impetus of an unlimited 'entertainment' budget provided by the school's principal.
On the plus side, Nihonshu could act as a wonderful social lubricant: the more we drank the more my host's English usually improved- or at least so he imagined- and I am damned sure my Japanese became bloody magnificent during any of those drunken forays in any of Akita's many, many drinking establishments. The downside, however, was that sake hammered me.
And it hammered me good-particularly when served warm, and in Akita,in my mind one of the coldest places on earth, even the best sake is served that way: usually from a small tokkuri made at a local kiln (pottery, as it turned out, became a much safer hobby for me than sake) and poured into a tiny guinomi that dispatched the sake down my waiting maw oh-so-smoothly. The problems started for me when I realized that as a guest in Japan, that little cup in your hand would never, ever be empty and that warm liquid seemed to get absorbed into my chilled interior startlingly fast.
Especially dangerous was when the local sake was consumed as part of Japan's Holy Trinity of alcohol: many beers to start, sake in the middle and whiskey to finish. Three or four nights of this ritual consumption a week definitely took a physical and mental toll, especially when doing battle with my Japanese colleagues who, lacking the enzyme to actually digest alcohol, seemed to have the endless capacity to guzzle copious amounts of alcohol, turn bright red, vomit our late-night ramen or udon on the sidewalk and wake up fresh as daisy.
I struggled to develop countermeasures to this endless sake drinking, but being so deeply a slave to Japan's complex web of obligation and obligatory drinking, I was essentially doomed from the start. I knew I was beat when during a rare two-day visit to a school on the Japan seaside, I spent a very long first evening getting totally polluted with a particular Japanese English teacher only to have to walk into his classroom to teach at 7:00 the next morning. It just sucked that he looked like he had spent the previous evening playing tiddly-winks and turned in at 9:30, while I was staggering, bleary-eyed, in front a classroom full of students still exuding sake from every pore. As much as I loved Akita and the people there, I was sort of grateful when my tenure ended and I could finally confine drinking to my own terms.
During my ensuing decade-plus in Japan I drank very little sake as my blossoming love of grape wine interceded and the smell of even the most delicate junmai-shu would instantly send me reeling back to that helpless feeling of having some equally zonked Japanese drinking buddy cheerfully pouring me onto the last train towards Akita City.
But time heals all wounds and, now 17 years after repatriating ourselves, I am sufficently dried out, very provisionally, and able to crawl back on the horse that threw me and, this past weekend, Anne and I accepted the invitation of some new friends to attend a sake tasting dinner at Hanazen, a very fine, very authentic Japanese restaurant in Orinda.
This is a very sweet little spot and if you don't know it, it's worth finding (www.myhanazen.com). It's run by a young couple: laconic Kenji, the taciturn, very Old School Chef and his lovely, loquacious wife Coco, daughter of one of Japan's best known sake critics, who conducts the tasting while Kenji turns out one lovely plate after another. Our autumnal menu started with a delicate piece of cod tempura stuffed with a few strands of green o-cha soba. This was paired with Kamikokoro, a soft lactic tokubetsu junmai from Okayama. Next came a stunning trio on one lovely plate: a bracingly briny surf clam sauced with a bit of fermented sea cucumber and served in a hollowed out persimmon, a snow ball of silky tofu and crab and an incredibly delicate piece of ocean trout wrapped somehow in a swirl of crisp green apple. This was a thrilling melange of tastes and textures and the sake, Otokoyama Kimoto, was aromatic, fruity and very good, if not a terribly dynamic companion to the dish. More sake came, of course, an Okunomatsu Ginjo to accompany a well-executed saba (mackeral) baked in miso; a very good Kikusui Hiyaoroshi- a seasonal sake paired with an oden that completely restored my faith in this dish, ruined for me by the smell of rancid over-simmered dashi in the typical Japanese convenience store, and a powerful, dry Suijin from Iwate, alongside a small platter of exquisite sashimi and sushi.
This really fun night of sake and food has opened the door for further investigation into the now-expanding world of imported sake. I've refrained from selling it at PRIMA as I would be the only one of my staff other than Peter with any knowledge of it and that knowledge was for many years tempered by my reluctance to get re-involved. My visit to Hanzen is causing me to rethink this, and next year may see Chef Peter and I reinvestigating our Japanese roots and creating our own version of the sake dinner. In the meantime, make the time to visit Hanazen and enjoy for yourself some very fine sake served the way it should be.....with some wonderful food.
