The man loved his job more than his life. Yonekichi Maeda is considered a co-founder of modern Japanese
cocktail culture. After learning his trade on the big ocean liners, as a bartender at Café Line in Tokyo’s Ginza district, he delighted his guests who were hungry for new kicks and published “Kokuteeru” in 1924, a collection of 287 recipes, including the first original Japanese cocktails. He then opened a liquor store, sold the cocktails he filled himself and died at the age of 42 as a result of excessive alcohol consumption.
However, his legacy – such as the Line Cocktail, consisting of Kyoto Dry Gin, Cocchi vermouth and Bénédictine and two dashes of Angostura – lives on, as does that of Louis Eppinger, of German origin, who opened the first Western-style cocktail bar in Yokohama’s Grand Hotel back in 1899. Whether it’s a grand hotel or a bar for everyone in entertainment districts like Ginza: Japan has a cocktail culture that puts ours in the shade by far. In Ginza alone, over 300 bars vie for the attention of guests.
It’s no wonder that with such competition, mixing is considered the highest craft, which must be practiced with the same meticulousness as cutting sashimi or filleting puffer fish. It takes at least ten years of professional experience to be taken seriously as a bartender, and it is not uncommon for a novice to spend the first few years wiping down the counter and brushing out the chef’s suit.
We can meet a particularly meticulous follower of this tradition in Julia Momosé, one in her Chicago bar Kumiko – shall we say a teacher? – Cocktail specialist who delights us with “Japanese Cocktails”, an exhaustive compendium of this art. From the very first page, the lady exudes the utmost dedication and absolute desire for perfection. “A cocktail,” Momosé is convinced, “can only be truly Japanese if it reflects the Japanese sense of harmony and connection.”
For that reason alone it is worth reading, which can be called mind-expanding in the best sense of the word. And while we’ll never match Momosé’s skill, there are a few of her creations worth trying out. sake and
Sonic, for example, a refreshing aperitif made from 3cl of rice shochu and 3cl of sake, topped up with 6cl of soda and 3cl of tonic. Sake and the Japanese schnapps shochu, which is mostly distilled from rice but also from sweet potatoes and barley, play a major role. Typical Japanese products such as yuzu fruit or matcha powder are just as important. For example, the Yuzu Salty Dog consists of 4.5 cl red grapefruit juice, 1.5 cl each of yuzu juice and sugar syrup, 3.75 cl Kyoto Dry Gin and a quarter teaspoon of matcha. First, the syrup and the ice-cold grapefruit and yuzu juices are poured into a glass and stirred, then the gin, classically shaken with the matcha, is carefully poured on top.
When the juices combine with the matcha gin in the mouth, they unfold a wonderfully tart aroma. No less complex and available in Asian specialty stores are Umeshu, the liqueur made from the Japanese apricot, and Ume Su, the accompanying vinegar, which also make amazing twists on classics like margarita and martini.
If that is too time-consuming for you, you can contact Klaus St. Rainer, who will show the novice the way to the living room shaker with 200 recipes that he has compiled for his book “Homebar”. However, if you only want to buy a cocktail book, Stephan Hinz’s “Cocktailkunst. The future of the bar” is recommended, almost a small standard work not only of mixing, but of the peculiarities, the use and the origin of alcoholic beverages in general.
“Preparing a drink,” says Hinz, “is neither irregular nor a secret science. It’s just a question of method and skill.” Whether it takes decades, as his Japanese colleague believes, remains to be seen.