You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. With all my ardor for Ototo and Tsubaki, it was only early this week that I realized I’d ignored an entire grouping of sakes on their lists for three years: “seasonal and nama.” She also creates fun headings like “fruits and flowers,” “earth and umami,” “rice and minerals” and “delicious weirdos,” with descriptions (“toasted rice and savory nuts, with a squeeze of lemon and even a little Comte cheese”) that reel you in. She gives expected distinctions between gradations of rice polish (Ginjo, Junmai Ginjo, Daiginjo). Kaplan has a gift for dividing them into categories that make an open-minded drinker eager to try new things. If there’s a deeper list of sakes than the one at Ototo available on the West Coast, I don’t know of it. She and Namba met in New York, and when they moved to his native Los Angeles, she worked first as a sommelier at places like Bestia before the couple opened Tsubaki in the truest spirit of an izakaya the experience is as much about Namba’s deft cooking as it is about Kaplan’s sake curations (as well as a succinct roster of geeky French wines). She wanted to keep up the language, so she landed a job at Shuji Bon Yagi’s legendary sake bar Decibel in Manhattan. Kaplan has been immersing herself in the subject of sake since the late 1990s, when she returned to the United States after a year of study in Japan. ![]() Your support helps us deliver the news that matters most. ![]() Enjoying this newsletter? Consider subscribing to the Los Angeles Times
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