Umami Mart

One of the great joys of importing barware from Japan is that we not only make annual visits to the factories in Niigata but we also get to stop into Ginpachi, a local sushi-ya in Sanjo City. Yoko and I now know that Ginpachi is closed on Mondays – one year we visited Niigata on a Monday […]

May sakes ship today for Sake Gumi, our monthly sake subscription club. If you like what’s on deck here, you should join! The days are longer, the bees are starting to store their honey, and the lines at ice cream stores are stretching around the block here in Old Oakland. This can only mean one thing – […]

February sakes ship today for Sake Gumi, our monthly sake subscription club. If you like what’s on deck here, you should probably join! Every winter, we take a trip to Niigata Pref. where sake and rice are king. Coincidentally, it is also where we source our barware and copper kitchenware items. After the end of […]

When we mentioned to Mr. Akio Watanabe, owner of Bar EST! in Tokyo that we were heading to Niigata, he recommended that we visit Bar Owl. It was one of those things that we told him we would do but Yoko and I didn’t actually think we would actually make it there — Niigata prefecture is […]

I’d like to start with a little background on the small town of Tsubame-Sanjo. This manufacturing town in Niigata Prefecture produces most of Japan’s stainless steel items. If you are enjoying a little cake with a tiny fork in Tokyo or stirring a cocktail with a barspoon from Umami Mart, chances are these utensils were […]

Sake is one of those things that really makes you appreciate locality. It’s like the meyer lemons in Berkeley. It’s totally cliche and played out, but local food traditions are a sight to behold. The fact that they are native to their land, makes them thrive and produce in abundance, giving the locals many, many […]

During our visit to Aoki Brewery in Niigata, we were told that the three most important factors of brewing sake is the rice, the water and the people. The rice that breweries use for sake-making are not the usual grains you find at the grocery store — they use special rice strains like Yamadanishiki, Koshitanrei, Ohmachi, […]

Kayoko and I go to Niigata every February. Our friends in Tokyo gasp in horror, “Why would you go somewhere so cold? In the middle of February?” The reason is kind of simple: it’s low season and getting around is cheap and less crowded. And the cold is not actually that bad. The locals are […]

Our Japan trip last month was a jam-packed, 5-city tour with barware factory tours, sake brewery pit-stops and a visit to a craft brewery! Niigata Beer has been around for 17 years now, brewing beers for the local market, and also making beers for other companies looking to outsource production. They do this quite often […]

When we voiced our wish to visit a few factories in Japan earlier this year, we didn’t realize that so many of them would be in the same town. Not just that, but only a short drive from one another. Tsubame City in Niigata is well known throughout Japan for its high quality steel, having […]