It was someday in 1987 when the telex arrived at Bar Sukatto in Utsunomiya, Japan, with some dangerous information from Rome: “No aquavit or sloe gin. Please revise recipe.”
Akira Tajima was making ready to fly to Italy for the finals of the Worldwide Bartenders Affiliation contest, the place he deliberate to current his Little Cat cocktail made with aquavit, sloe gin, sambuca, grenadine, lime and tonic water.
“I needed to provide you with a brand new model that day,” remembers Tajima, who determined that grappa may work instead of aquavit, and cherry brandy may stand in for sloe gin. It wasn’t fairly the recipe he had practiced and fretted over, however it received.
It was a triumph for Japan and a second of satisfaction for Utsunomiya, a metropolis the dimensions of Sacramento 80 miles north of Tokyo, the established epicenter of Japanese cocktail tradition. What no person knew on the time was that it was the primary swell in a deluge of success that will flip the town, higher referred to as the gyoza capital of Japan, right into a critical cocktail vacation spot.
Later that yr, on the finals of the Nippon Bartenders Affiliation contest, the judges topped Utsunomiya’s Yuzo Yamanoi their champion. Astonishingly, the runner-up was Yamanoi’s mentor, Nobuyuki Ogawa, who had educated him after they labored in sibling bars, each known as Paipu no Kemuri. Then issues actually bought rolling. Ogawa entered once more the next yr, and received; their colleague Yuichi Hoshi took the title a yr later; and Paipu no Kemuri alumnus Hisashi Katagiri made it a four-year sweep in 1990.
“The primary yr folks thought it was a fluke,” says Yamanoi. “The second yr, it was: Hmmm? The third yr: ‘Ah, that is nonsense.’ After 4 it was, ‘OK, you lot do your factor.’”
{That a} small metropolis nestled within the shadow of Tokyo may so constantly dominate the nation’s prime bartending prize was a seismic shock, akin to the Judgment of Paris tasting in 1976 that propelled Napa wines to international acclaim. What made it all of the extra extraordinary was that Utsunomiya hardly had a cocktail tradition to talk of on the time.
The Japanese Cocktail, Reconsidered
Julia Momosé’s The Approach of the Cocktail and Masahiro Urushido’s The Japanese Artwork of the Cocktail provide contrasting, trendy views on the Japanese method to bartending.
Right here Comes Japanese Rum
With its distilling prowess and lengthy historical past of sugar cane manufacturing, Japan was all the time poised for a rum growth.
“It was a bottle-service metropolis,” says Ogawa, now 75 and nonetheless working in the identical 26-seat bar he joined 49 years in the past. Clients bought low-cost Nikka or Suntory blends by the bottle and saved them on the bar to drink on future visits. “They normally ordered it twice-up,” he says, utilizing the Japanese time period for half whisky, half water.
So why follow a craft your prospects aren’t excited about? “Service is service. Research is research. Coaching is coaching,” says Ogawa. “And, I wished to be a champion.”
In 1994, Utsunomiya’s Mari Okabe, previously of Paipu no Kemuri, turned the primary lady to raise the trophy, and 4 years later, Masamitsu Nagaoka introduced it again to the town. “We have been the folks to beat,” says Tajima, who by then had been recruited to open a bar in Ginza, the epicenter of Tokyo’s cocktail scene. Utsunomiya was immediately a bartending expertise pool. Hoshi was employed to open a Ginza bar, too, and has gone on to construct a seven-bar empire there. “But it surely was solely bartenders and business insiders who knew about us within the ’90s,” says Ogawa. “Most individuals related the town with gyoza or jazz.”
For causes unclear, Japan’s Ministry of Inside Affairs maintains a rating of cities by dumpling consumption per capita; Utsunomiya is all the time first or second. The town’s jazz scene, in the meantime, was galvanized by native son Sadao Watanabe, whose stardom impressed locals to take up music and vacationers to go to. After the slew of cocktail contest wins, metropolis officers realized their bartenders had related potential. In 1999 they helped set up the Utsunomiya Cocktail Membership, with a mission to draw cocktail lovers to the town.
The membership is answerable for printing bar maps, staging cocktail festivals within the city sq., and, previously, producing ready-to-drink bottled cocktails for consuming at residence. However simply as importantly, the membership has cemented a camaraderie among the many metropolis’s bartenders.
“In Utsunomiya, when a younger bartender desires to enter a contest, it’s not simply their very own grasp who teaches them; the masters of different bars do, too. It’s nice to ask anybody for assist earlier than or after service,” says Hiroshi Takeuchi, who got here to Utsunomiya 26 years in the past to be an engineer however switched careers after turning into captivated by the native bar tradition. He now runs after-hours spot Hiro:Z and is chairman of the cocktail membership.
“{That a} small metropolis nestled within the shadow of Tokyo may so constantly dominate the nation’s prime bartending prize was a seismic shock, akin to the Judgment of Paris tasting in 1976 that propelled Napa wines to international acclaim. ”
“The scene is so robust as a result of everybody constructed it collectively,” says Takahiro Soeda, chief bartender of Bar Chamonix, arguably probably the most upmarket bar within the metropolis. His Macallan assortment begins with a 1936 classic and his wine cellar is stocked with Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, however the actual sights are his cocktails made with homegrown fruit, herbs and greens. His Gin Fizz, as an example, is made with freshly muddled myoga (Japanese ginger), and his Gin & Tonic comes with a kick of sansho pepper.
Soeda was born simply two years earlier than the beginning of the well-known profitable streak and grew up well-versed in his metropolis’s bar tradition. “I used to be into whisky and cocktails since, properly, it’s in all probability not good to specify that,” he says. As quickly as he reached authorized consuming age, he requested 1998 champion Nagaoka for a bartending job at Chamonix, the place he has remained for the previous 18 years.
Soeda says the extent of technical mastery in Utsunomiya is at the least as excessive as in Ginza, and Tokyo-based bartenders often go to for analysis or sheer enjoyment. However the cocktail expertise in Utsunomiya comes with out the buttoned-up formality that characterizes elite bars within the capital.
“Folks take the time to return right here, so it’s a must to make it enjoyable sufficient to return again for,” says Takeuchi. “Utsunomiya fashion is pleasant, informal, chatty.” Or, as Yamanoi places it, “We’re que será será.”
The town goes by means of a dry patch when it comes to trophies. The Nippon Bartenders Affiliation’s prime prize now goes with predictable regularity to Ginza, and the final time anybody from Utsunomiya received a cocktail contest was in 2016, when Kazuhito Otsuka of Bar Cave completed first in a contest organized by Padrón cigars with a intelligent dessert drink that begins with torching espresso beans over the strainer of a cobbler shaker.
Even with out current awards, Utsunomiya’s bar scene is prospering. The day-trippers who come for gyoza now know to seize a cocktail earlier than heading residence, and cocktails are a part of the every day routine for a lot of locals in a metropolis so compact {that a} little bit of barhopping on the best way residence is straightforward.
Hirofumi Ogawa, who works alongside father Nobuyuki within the bar now referred to as Musshu Ogawa Paipu no Kemuri, says he isn’t excited about making an attempt to win trophies. “I simply give attention to at this time and serving every buyer one after the other,” he says. It’s a sentiment echoed by Tajima, the town’s first world champion, who’s again from Ginza and working a bar known as As Time Goes By. “Trophies aren’t the aim,” he says. “They’re the beginning.”
