Floating at the back of wine lists across the United States, just before the amari and the sherry, is an oft-unexplored island of sake, where a few bottles reside untethered, unexplained. Some drinkers will wonder why they’re there; most will not even notice them.
There has long been an inclination to try to reflect the interesting and diverse sakes coming into the U.S. Importers are now carving out space for all styles—from the more conventional and traditional to those that find similarities with natural wine. Canned and cup sake are also on the rise, as are American-made sakes brewed in Oakland, Brooklyn and Portland, Oregon. Despite all of this, Americans have mostly siloed sake as a drink to enjoy solely in Japanese restaurants, which has kept its restaurant audience rather limited.
To be clear, there are some spectacular sake lists around the country, but examples at restaurants outside of the Japanese canon are few and far between. It’s not for lack of trying on the part of beverage directors; over the last 20 years, several have endeavored in various ways without much luck. But if anyone can bring sake to the larger beverage conversation, it’s Courtney Kaplan at Camélia in Los Angeles.
Kaplan and her partner, chef Charles Namba, opened Tsubaki, a Japanese izakaya in L.A.’s Echo Park almost eight years ago. In 2019, they opened Ototo, a sake bar, next door; both venues are well-loved by in-the-know Angelenos. In each, sake is the focal point of the beverage list. In July, the pair expanded beyond the neighborhood to open Camélia downtown in the Arts District. Here, the point of view of the cuisine is quite different. The vision, as Kaplan describes it, is “a French bistro in Tokyo.”
Located in a former Nabisco factory, Camélia is brick-floored and glows under Frenchie globe lamps that hang over rattan chairs at wood tables set with forks, knives and chopsticks. Here, the menu pulls from French classics—a raw bar, bouillabaisse, croque madame, boeuf bourguignon—with Japanese ingredients like shiso, purple yam, negi (green onion) and ponzu as inflection points. And the beverage list mirrors the hybrid menu. It’s three-fifths classically minded bottles of French wines, and two-fifths sake; Champagne and Burgundian aligoté run parallel to junmai ginjo and junmai yamahai. Kaplan estimates 40 percent of guests order sake, an impressive feat in what’s ostensibly a French restaurant. “This is exactly why I wanted to do this project,” says Kaplan. “It’s so much fun to see them side by side on the table, people going back and forth between the two.”
As far back as the late ’90s, Roger Dagorn, sommelier at the now-closed (and still missed) Chanterelle in New York City, found ways to pair sake with David Waltuck’s French cuisine. Also in New York, Rouge Tomate, a leader in natural wine 15 years ago, stocked a significant amount of sake. It’s an enduring interest today in many forms, with sake making one-off appearances with tasting menus and by-the-glass lists, as the base for lower-alcohol Martinis, and as a shot with happy hour specials. In San Francisco, at the Italian restaurant Itria, AJ Macias features 11 sakes by the list and bottle, with two of the pairings on the tasting menu being sake—a commitment larger than most. But none have managed to give sake anywhere near equal billing in the way that Kaplan does at Camélia.
“If you just see one bottle of sake on the list, I know chances are that whoever’s writing that list absolutely loves that sake,” says Kaplan. “But it can start to kind of feel like, ‘Why would I order sake here when this is obviously not the focus?’”
At Camélia, sake is clearly a focus. Kaplan has a well-earned leg up when it comes to selling sake, having garnered trust among regulars at Tsubaki and Ototo, but she’s not solely relying on those relationships to translate to bottles on tables. And while she is certainly a fixture tableside, it’s her drinks list itself that does the hard work of providing evidence that both sake and wine are valid options.
The first page of the list changes monthly based on a theme Kaplan is interested in. Recently, it featured a section of wines titled Ancient Vines, in which each bottling was made from vines over 100 years old, and one of Ancient Rice, which included sakes made from very old rice varieties like Omachi, Wataribune and Hattanso that are now being resuscitated by farmers. The next page, titled Almighty (a nuanced term in Japanese), is a roll call of wines and sakes that Kaplan describes as “crowd-pleasing, not necessarily meant to be the most challenging or cerebral experience, but meant to be delicious and easy. They’ll pair with every single dish.” The rest of the list is divided into A Side and B Side, with more classic wines and sakes in the first and more adventuresome options on the latter.
“I wanted to represent different styles of sake because I do think that’s part of sake’s image problem. It gets pigeonholed,” Kaplan says. “People think it all tastes the same and I wanted to show off what a broad category it is.” To this end, she presents seasonal sakes (e.g., freshly pressed shiboritate sakes in the spring, and slightly aged, mushroomy hiyaoroshi sakes in the fall) along with a new class of sparkling sakes, such as Masumi’s origarami, which she compares with pét-nat.
“[Sake] is just such a great beverage for pairing. It gives you so much more versatility in a lot of ways,” says Kaplan, pointing to oysters as a particularly optimal sake pairing. “Just like we have a Muscadet by the glass, we want to have the equivalent in a sake at all times,” she says. But she’s confident that sake’s pairing abilities go beyond seafood, even with the richer ingredients that many French bistro dishes involve. “The Japanese influence lightens up some of the flavors, but there’s still a good amount of butter and dairy, so I’m thinking about sakes to harmonize with those,” she says, pointing to a more modern class of sakes that are made with specific yeasts to up the acidity of the drink.
In this wine-sake balance, there is space for both and perhaps an opportunity to expand on one’s drinking palate. “And I’m not here to disparage wine. I love wine, but in some ways, if I had to have one glass of something for this whole meal”—and if it wasn’t Champagne, Kaplan jokes—“it might be sake.”
