Umami Mart

Our Second Annual Sake Dinner at Camino is happening this Thursday and we can finally share the menu with you. Here are the details! Hope you can join us. Buy your tickets on Eventbrite.

Last month, we debuted Far Leaves Tea‘s Oakland Blend at our Sip and Shop event, where it proved to be a favorite amongst tasters. Back by popular demand, we’ve brought this Limited Edition tea to our shelves. A Pu’er-based tea, it’s balanced out and made interesting with pepper, ginger, barley, and orange peel. Like our home […]

Last week we teamed up with Blind Tiger for Sake Gumi Underground, our second annual Sake Gumi Social. We had a blast! We love bringing together our Sake Gumi members with other Bay Area sake enthusiasts for a night of eating and drinking. Blind Tiger opened in Oakland’s Koreatown district this last year, and is a large bar located […]

Recently, I got into a discussion about all the restaurants that have been popping up in the Bay Area. The constant stream of new, hip restaurants is never ending in the East Bay and San Francisco, and it’s hard to keep up. Of all of those restaurants that have opened in the last year, Hina […]

For this edition of Bartender Spotlight, I spoke with Will Tsui, who tends bar at Rich Table in Hayes Valley and Lazy Bear in the Mission. Will lives in Oakland, in Jack London Square, where he invited me over for a cocktail on a Monday morning. He made me a Vieux Banane, a drink using […]

Oakland just got a little bit hipper (if that was at all possible) – we now have our very own Mikkeller bar! Opened in the former Trappist Provisions space, the tasting room and bottle shop is a charming ode to all things Mikkeller. Mikkeller launched as a beer brewery in Copenhagen in 2006. They are an innovative company […]

For this edition of Bartender Spotlight, we set our focus on the East Bay at Tay Ho in Downtown Oakland. Tay Ho recently brought bartender Esteban Ballesteros (who also tends bar at Bull Valley Roadhouse) on board to help revamp their cocktail program. Tay Ho is definitely a hidden gem when it comes to great Vietnamese cuisine, […]

This was our second time teaching the Preserving and Cooking with Shio Koji class at Preserved, a retail shop focused on preserved and fermented goods, owned and operated by our good friend Elizabeth. The shop is full of tools, books, and goodies to help you pickle, brew, jam, and can to your heart’s content. Elizabeth has […]

We are growing our team and calling out to those interested in working with us at Umami Mart. We’re currently looking for a part-time shopkeeper. Read on for details.

Join us next Thursday, July 21, at Preserved (5032 Telegraph Ave.) in Oakland, where Yoko and Kayoko will be teaching a class about Preserving and Cooking with Koji. Koji, or Aspergillus oryzae, is a rice mold that’s been used in Japan to produce sake, miso, and shoyu for hundreds of years. Recently, modern chefs have discovered the wonders of shio […]