Umami Mart

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 […]

Hi, I am back. It’s been quite a while since I last posted. Umami Mart has been crazy for Kayoko and Yoko, and I’ve been creating recipes non-stop and teaching cooking classes which has been occupying most of my time. However, having heard the great news that Umami Mart is selling sake and beer, I couldn’t help […]

Every time I go to Japan, I am exposed to new foods, new regions and new friends. Even though I lived there for five years and visit every year, there is still so much to discover. Sometimes I think about how I want to travel to other countries and discover new cultures and lands, but […]

When people ask Yoko or myself if it was “always in the plan” to turn Umami Mart into a brick and mortar shop, the answer is always “no.” We do get this question quite often. But back in 2007 when we started our blog, I was living in Brooklyn and Yoko was in Tokyo, on […]

Four friends find themselves in a secluded VRBO (Vacation Rental By Owner) on the North Shore of Oahu. They thought paradise was at arm’s length, but they were wrong. One by one each thirty-something is lured by the mysterious, irresistible charms of the tropical landscape. Kayoko, the strong-headed of the group, is on a one-woman […]

Alchemy Bottle Shop opened this year in March on Grand Avenue in Oakland. Owners Tova and Peter’s selection is second-to-none, featuring everything from single malts (including a great selection from Japan) to hard-to-find amaros. Kayoko and I get lost in la-la land whenever we enter Alchemy. Our admiration for Alchemy Bottle Shop led to collaborating […]

We just completed our fourth shochu talk and tasting, this time at Alchemy Bottle Shop in Oakland. What a great audience! We had a fantastic time talking to people about shochu, and thought that Washi Washino’s first blog post about shochu would be appropriate to revisit here too. Washi, Umami Mart’s resident Shochu Advisor shares […]

We’ve been event-crazy here at Umami Mart. We’ve put on one event every week in June and we are not slowing down! We’ve hosted sake events several times at Umami Mart HQ (in Oakland), but on June 10th we took the show on the road to 18 Reasons, a food education space, in San Francisco. […]

The Bay Area has been so good to us. First, we opened our flagship store in Oakland in 2012 — to our surprise, people were into our Japanese kitchen and barware shop! Then, back in November, we opened up as a pop-up shop inside The Perish Trust, in San Francisco. Yoko and I anxiously opened […]