A Secret Sake Restaurant in Tokyo

Sanemura-san (right) with Rie Itoh Somewhere in Tokyo
Thanks to Yoshi whom we met with his girlfriend Erika at the Daitoryo izakaya near Okachimachi, we went to the most minimalist restaurant of Tokyo you can think of, and this was a wonderful experience. This is a very different world from the popular down-to-earth tachinomya and other casual izakaya. This type of almost-secret restaurant is everything-Tokyo too, a city where gastronomy reigns unchallenged under all forms.
The owner of the venue is also the cook there, and he has been scouring the world through his travels, taking recipes and sourcing rare artisanal products in the way. His restaurant is the ultimate result of this search for perfection.
Sake is on the front seat at Cotyuu, with artisan-type of sake often made with the no-additives kimoto sakemaking process. At Cotyuu, you find the different cuvées of 5 distinct sake breweries which have been selected by the Maître des lieux, and given the way he sources his ingredients in the kitchen, I'm pretty confident about any sake you can find here.
To find the restaurant, you must know the exact address, there is no way to guess it when you pass the modern building along this boulevard in central Tokyo. Once in the place, you find yourself at one end of a long room with a wall on the right and a long table on the left, the kitchen being behind the sliding door on the side.
As the restaurant owners prefer the word of mouth to find their customers, I'll not display the address, but if you look hard, you should find it.

The lone table-counter at Cotyuu There's something in the austere, temple-like minimalist simplicity of the room that inspires you : you're here obviously for a food experience where no distracting detail is needed. Just take a chair among the 8 seats along the table, and be ready. The kitchen is on your right, you'll see the sliding door open slightly from time to time, this is the signal that some dish is ready, and Rie, the waitress, will walk to the sliding door and grab the dishes. Once during the evening maybe, Sanemura-san will spend a few minutes outside the kitchen to chat with the customers.
Cotyuu opened a few months ago, in october 2011, and it has since a steady flow of visitors attracted by the refineness of the dishes and the sake selection. When we arrived there, there were already a couple near whom we sat, then a New-Zealand expat who looked like a regular came in, then a 60-something Japanese who seemed to be a business man originally from Osaka and who had the typical warmth and communicative enjoyment of the people of Osaka. We chatted joyously together__I mean B. chatted, that's the trouble when you don't understand anything, you're left mostly in the dark, except for a few translated excerpts, so I just took comfort in the general feel that I sensed through the exchange... Let the feast begin... We were given two simple menus printed on paper, one for the food, one for the sake, and helped by the young woman who was behind the table (and B.'s knowledge of Japanese and of Kanji), we ordered small dishes as well as jugs of sake, each of us ordering a different sake for a better coverage of the venue's cellar. When I say cellar, it's a virtual cellar because the 1,8-liter sake bottles are stocked in the cabinet running all along the wall behind the waitress. Asked about the storage conditions, she says that these quality sake don't spoil when stored and opened even at room temperature.
Here are a few of the delicate sake we had (written down by B., I'm not sure the names are complete, this doesn't speak much to me) :
__ Hioki zakura tokubetsu junmai (polished 55 %), from the region of Tottori.
__ Take tsuru junmai, from Hiroshima.
__ Tenten Musume, from Tottori region too.
__ Sui Gyu, from the region of Nara. Squid with hot sauce The squid with its chili sauce was pairing quite well with the sake, although I'll be unable to tell you which one we had at this point (taking notes sometimes spoils the pleasure of the moment).
Before that, we had crushed burdock of sesame seed paste (500 Y) and also specially marinated salsifies. We had some smoked macquerel (800 Y), the fish was very lightly smoked and had a very enjoyable texture, with a feel closer to a very tender dry meat than to what you would expect for smoked fish. After that, some sort of thin green pancakes cut into small squares (I don't remember which dish it was). We had also a small bowl of fermented oysters swimming in their own sauce, that the cook sourced from a restaurant in Hong Kong where it's made the very traditional way, which requires care and time as they macerate slowly in salt. We're said that all the oyster sauce found in the shops is a standardized product with lots of bad stuff and additives added. The taste here is indeed very concentrated and intense, it feels like urchins meat, it's very onctuous. I'm not an expert in oyster sauce but that's good. Then we had an Omelette du Mont Saint-Michel (1000 Y), which had a bigger size so that we could fill up in addition to relish the refined foods.
There were some 20 dishes to choose from, all very refined and made with top ingredients, most costing between 450 Y and 700 Y and a few at 1000 or 1200 Y. Expect to pay about 10 000 Y (about 100 €) for two, including several jugs of sake. Cuvées made from different local rice varieties Here is a line of sake made by the Ota brewery (I think it's in the Tottori Prefecture), each of these cuvées having been made with a different local rice variety. Apart from the variety difference, the sakemaking has been exactly the same, using the same quality of water, meaning that you taste here the unique characteristics of the variety and possibly of the physical environment of the rice paddies. We were told during the brewery visits that the vintage gives its own expression in sake too, because for example if the rice grain suffered from heat or drought, it will not absorb the water the same way than on a normal season and the fermentation will yield different results. The traditional sake heater All the sake here is lightly heated with this traditional water-bath heater in which metal mugs containing sake reach gently the desired temperature. Thermometers help check when it's time to take out the mugs and pour the sake into the small jugs. The Japanese have different serving temperatures, from cold to hot, each with its own Japanese name. Nuru-kam (lukewarm - 40/45 ° C) being I think the favorite temperature, at least during the cold season. See this page listing the different serving temperatures for sake. Note that the "cold" sake is served in a cup in its wooden masu and that "warm" sake is served into these nice frail Japanese jugs. We both prefer drink sake at room temperature, but we still enjoy the lukewarm option, especially that it cools down rapidly when you don't drink it straight away. Warm sake is making a comeback these days as people rediscover its vertues, but it is said that for a sake to be enjoyable warm, it has to have certain quality features first. Read this page on warm sake where it is said that kimoto sake (the equivalent for sake of natural wine), fares better in front of the temperature challenge, as the natural elements in the wine behave better on the tasting feel than when the sake has been manipulated with additives. This page is published by the Daishichi brewery in the Fukushima Prefecture, which we visited 4 years ago. Daishichi is also one of the rare breweries (shuzo) to follow the natural kimoto sakemaking method. 4 cuvées of sake that you won't find at the next Konbini Here are the 4 cuvées made with the natural-sakemaking kimoto method, the two on the left come from the Take-Tsuru Shuzo in the region of Hiroshima, the two on the right, or at least one, come from Suiriu Shuzo, in the Tottori region. These sake are made by the two Toji who are doing a lot to promote the kimoto sake in Japan, as there's a renewed interest these days in a sakemaking using no additives. These Toji are Mr Ichikawa from Take-Tsuru (Hiroshima) and Mr Kato from Suiriu Shuzo. To remind what kimoto is, it's the traditional way of mixing a natural-yeast culture with koji and rice, it's a lot of hard work as it requires doing it by hand for a long time before the fermentation starts, but this is the way sake makers would do before the biotech industry produced the lab yeasts and other additives (like the lactic-acid additive) to speed up the process. According to John Gauntner of Sake-World, the trick to add lactic acid to speed the whole thing was discovered in 1911 and it took 10 years for the industry to catch up, with now virtually all the breweries using the additives technology. Read this insightful piece on sake making, where you'll also learn that Daishichi in Fukushima has been the first to dare brew a ginjo and then a daiginjo with a kimoto yeast starter. It is very interesting to notice that in this question, wine and sake have been on a roughly parallel course in Europe and in Japan in terms of changing ways to make the thing, and that is even more interesting to learn that a few inspired and daring sakemakers are actively reintroducing the traditional method, giving way to more pronounced flavors and life feel in the sake. Having been given the chance to drink also newly-pressed, unpasteurized sake of this type, I can tell you that there's a future in this direction if people are given the chance to taste both ways of sake...
Thank you to Sanemura-san and Rie for having opened a new window to us on sake and fine food.

Shitamachi atmosphere in Yanaka, near Nippori (Tokyo)

Cotyuu : the blog. If you read Japanese, you'll learn more about the sake Shuzo in Tottori as well as about the fermented oysters made in a small village of continental China.
Cotyuu : on Twitter. Note the pic icon of Sanemura-san, a 1954 picture by Cartier-Bresson showing a young boy rue Mouffetard carrying home two bottles of wine...(see a larger version of this picture)
A tasting of Daishichi sake by Thimothy Sullivan
Article on how the Daishichi brewery (which is located 60 km from the failed N plant), is coping with the situation

Comments

[Geert]

Love the article. I'm back in Tokyo next week, could you please send me the address? I'll keep it confidential, but love to try the saké there.

Geert