Umami Mart

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 […]

Last Sunday, 27 Sake Gumi members took a field trip to the Bay Area’s very own sake brewery – Sequoia Sake in San Francisco. Jake Myrick, his wife Noriko Kamei, and Jake’s friend Warren Pfal started Sequoia Sake together in the lower Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco in 2014. What makes Sequoia Sake so special […]

We are excited to announce our very first field trip exclusively for Sake Gumi members. We’re going to Sequoia Sake Brewery in San Francisco! This is the City’s first sake brewery and we are thrilled to share with this opportunity to tour the site with Sequoia’s founders and sit down for a special sake tasting and food […]

Last Thursday, we celebrated a momentous occasion – Kayoko’s 36th birthday! Collaborating with our friends at Holy Mountain, we threw a party that we dubbed Kayoko’s Cherry Blossom Cobbler Birthday Festival 3000. If you’ve never been to Holy Mountain, you’re missing out. Perched above Hawker Fare’s San Francisco location on Valencia Street, it’s exactly the kind of watering hole […]

We are so excited to announce our first cocktail class collaboration with PlumpJack Wine & Spirits! PlumpJack is a liquor and wine shop in Noe Valley and the Marina neighborhood in San Francisco, as well as a winery in Napa (founded by Gavin Newsom, hello!). We’ve teamed up with the good folks over at Forgery […]

Yoko and I will be hanging out at Sake Summit all weekend in Union Square in San Francisco. Come visit us! This is your chance to try pretty much all the sakes that are available for consumption in the Bay Area. If you’re into sake, you can’t miss this! This is the third annual Sake […]

When MUJI came to us last year to put on a collaborative event together, Yoko and I did not not hesitate to say YES. A leading retailer in Japan, MUJI has been around for decades, outfitting people’s homes, kitchens, wardrobes and backpacks full of understated, minimal, yet high-quality goods. We respect them greatly, and were […]

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’re excited to announce upcoming events with collaborators in San Francisco that we greatly admire. 18 Reasons and MUJI! The first event is coming up this next Monday 8/18 at 18 Reasons in San Francisco. Yoko and I will be exploring the concept of U M A M I: its roots, definition, examples and tastings. […]

In November, we snuck in to San Francisco and popped-up in The Perish Trust for the holidays. But it’s now April, spring is in bloom, and we’re still here! We’ll actually be staying in San Francisco until the new year, so on April 10th, we had a little party to celebrate our semi-perminant-pop-up. In this […]