Keita Akaboshi: Pairing Sake with Japanese Convenience Store Sweets and Snacks

A few of you have told me that you are especially interested in sake pairings. I am, too, so it didn’t take much prompting to get me to write a post on the topic. I’m also including a few news tidbits at the end that you might find interesting. I’d love to hear any feedback on the new format.

            The sake pairing portion of the post comes to you in the form of a Q&A with Keita Akaboshi, a Tokyo-based sake sommelier, wine sommelier and restaurateur. We first met in New York City back around 2014, when I was researching this story charting sake’s rise in popularity here. Keita was working as national sales manager for sake importer Kuramoto, US and moonlighting as a bartender at Sushi Tsushima (where I recall him one Halloween pouring sake from inside a cute animal costume). His passion was to introduce drinkers to novel sake pairings.

            Keita showed me how the creamy saltiness of a Valdeon Spanish blue cheese paired beautifully with an Aiyu Brewery shiboritate nama (fresh-pressed, unpasteurized) sake. The acidity of the nama cut through the fatty richness of the cheese, and the natural umami of both the sake and the cheese bound them into a seamless whole. Another pairing was a honey-sweetened Greek yogurt with a fruity Madoka honjozo.

            Keita talked about his plans to open a restaurant in Tokyo that would pair Japanese-Italian cuisine and cheese with sakes, a combination he particularly liked.

            I didn’t realized how soon he was to realize that plan, collaborating with his friend, chef Michihiro Kumagai for the 2015 opening of his restaurant Akaboshi & Kumagai (or Aka-Kuma for short). I’ve visited the restaurant, located in the ex-pat-heavy Tokyo neighborhood of Azabu-Juban, several times over the years. I’m always dazzled by Michihiro Kumagai’s beautiful Japanese-European cooking, especially alongside Keita’s thoughtful, exciting pairings.

            One memorable dinner in 2016 began with a cold corn soup paired with Aramasa Brewery’s sparkling Amaneko sake brewed with white koji. The sake’s fine bubbles and fruit-and-sour edge sliced gently through the cool creaminess of the soup. A gorgeous dish of raw oyster, boiled edamame, okra and deep-fried sweet fish was a fresh-and-oily foil to a dry Imanishi Brewery Mimurosugi karakuchi tokubetsu junmai sake.

            I lost track of Keita for a bit, and then during the pandemic, his posts started popping up in my feed. I noticed that he had drilled down to an even more specialized niche, pairing sake with convenience store sweets and snacks.

            There were intriguing combos like Wakura Brewery’s Takeoka Bizen Omachi junmai with a peach-flavored raw milk yogurt, or an apple-vinegar-ish Miyavi junmai sake (a collab between Kyoto’s Tsuki no Katsura Brewery and guitarist Miyavi) paired with pistachio ice cream.

            As worlds shrank during lockdown, Japan’s ubiquitous and wonderful convenience stores like Lawson’s and 7/11 were sometimes as far as the apartment-bound dweller could get.

            This is not as much of a hardship as it sounds. Japanese convenience stores (even 7/11!) do not revolve around oversized Slurpees and quick-serve pizza; they’re neighborhood depots where you can get a wide variety of one-cup sakes, canned-high balls, coffee or tea, fresh onigiri rice balls and even oden, that simmered- vegetable staple of old Tokyo.

            But enough preamble, here’s the Q&A.  If you are in Tokyo or plan to be there soon, good news: Aka-Kuma reopened after the pandemic lockdown on July 13, and is now offering seven-course, seven-sake pairing dinners. A must try when you visit Tokyo!

NM: For a long time, many Japanese sake experts were not interested in exploring sake’s potential for food pairing. Why were you different in this regard?

KA: I believe that pairing Japanese sake, combining it with food—more than drinking sake alone—is a better way to fully draw out its strengths. Sake goes well with a variety of food regardless of type, whether Italian, French, or Japanese cuisine.

NM: What got you interested in the idea of this Instagram pairing series?

KA: Since I returned to Japan in 2015, I have started pairing sake with sweets. One reason that I looked to convenience store sweets is that I didn’t want to create high hurdles to experiencing these pairings—these are easily accessible for anyone to try.

NM: What have been some of your favorite pairings of the series?

KA: Currently, I’m particularly fond of cream puffs with Miyanoyuki junmai ginjo because of the way the puffs’ vanilla flavor is a very close match to junmai’s vanilla-pear tones. And I like the pairing of the Okayama brewery Shirakiku’s Awazo sparkling sake and Glico grapefruit flavored fruit ice balls (アイスの実). The Awazo contains the same flavors, aroma and bitterness of grapefruit, so they go well together.

NM: Are there any savory pairings that you have been enjoying during the pandemic?

KA: Recently, I’ve been eating a lot of ochazuke. The dashi in my ochazuke and Japanese sake go perfectly together.

NM: There are people like Tokyo bartender Marie Chiba (look for a profile of her in our forthcoming book, by the way) who have evolved theories about sake and food pairing: why some work and others don’t, and the differences between how westerners and Japanese eat and drink sake. Do you feel your ideas on pairings are similar to hers?

KA: I think Marie Chiba is an amazing person. However, there is no one correct pairing for a sake, each pairing is merely one proposal. I just want to suggest different and interesting pairing ideas to people.

More Sake News

 Recently on Clubhouse

 Last week I hosted a Clubhouse room on West Coast USA sake. It was fascinating to hear how breweries both large and small have, counter-intuitively, prospered during the pandemic. Saké One president Steve Vuylsteke told us that the company logged a record sales year in the fiscal year ending in March of this year, with sales up 11 percent. This beat out wine sales at wine, liquor and retail grocery stores during that same period, according to the market research firm IRI—they were up only 8 percent. Overall USA sake sales rose a whopping 21.3 percent. If you just look at Saké One’s retail sake sales alone, they were up an even more eye-popping 44.2 percent. Other big makers posted similarly large double-digit figures. 

Yoshi Sako, founder and brewer at Oakland’s Den Sake also reported that he has been having a hard time keeping up with demand, while Vancouver restaurateur Iori Kataoka told us that her customers at Yuwa Japanese Cuisine are spending big on luxury bottles of sake like Kokuryu Ishidaya or Born’s Dreams Come True.

 Meanwhile, the news out of Japan’s sake world continues to be dire. Kyoko Nagano of Sake Lovers told us while it is not strictly against the law for izakayas to be open and serving sake to customers, the finance ministry has sent letters to sake breweries urging them not to sell to izakayas. Even more unbelievable, the government briefly floated an ill-conceived plan to share with banks information on client restaurants that aren’t complying with the alcohol ban, presumably so they can exert pressure, perhaps in the form of withholding loans, from bar and restaurant owners. This gives you a sense of how besieged sake makers and izakayas are now in Japan. Izakaya culture itself may be threatened, according to this Reuters story.

 Recommended Reading

 My friend Anna Lee Iijima takes a tantalizing look at the booming domestic sake scene in this story for Wine Enthusiast, speaking to the founders of the self-proclaimed “nano brewery” Arizona Sake, as well as with the people behind Brooklyn Kura, breweries in Virginia and Tennessee, and the granddaddy of them all, Blake Richardson’s moto-I in Minneapolis.

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