‘We cherish everything’: How the Japanese make perfect drinks

Manabu Ohtake has the look of a sushi master. It’s all in the calm poise, the way he carries himself behind the bar, the precise movements, the absolute concentration.

Ohtake isn’t shaping rice or slicing fish though. Right now he is crouched over a bottle of whisky and a jigger, held between two fingers, pouring just the right amount of liquid before twisting his hand and upending the small cup into a cocktail shaker.

Manabu Ohtake, Palace Hotel Tokyo’s master cocktail maker.

Eventually, this will become a perfect whisky sour. The most beautifully balanced, expertly mixed, skilfully presented whisky sour you have seen. Art in a glass.

To anyone who knows Japan, this will come as no surprise. This is a country in which every art form and indeed every practice in life is taken seriously, with patience and skill applied to their perfection.

Trains run on time, cities are immaculately clean, outfits are carefully put together and food in particular is obsessed over, every plate and dish the result of years of experimentation and precision.

So yes, you should expect that that attitude would run to cocktail culture. And it does.

“In the international cocktail scenes, they’re treasuring the atmosphere of the bar or the place, then the cocktails,” says Ohtake, speaking to me through a translator one afternoon at Royal Bar, his theatre and laboratory, a dark, cosy space within the luxurious Palace Hotel Tokyo. “But in Japan there’s a contrast, we cherish the procedure of making the cocktails. That would be 80 per cent of everything.”

The classic decor at Palace Hotel Tokyo’s Royal Bar.

Unsurprisingly, some of the most popular cocktails in Japan are those with timeless appeal.

“The young generation here start drinking creative cocktails,” Ohtake says, “but then they graduate from that into more simple, classic cocktails. The reason for that is Japanese people like really simple things, like sushi, tempura, where the procedure is so important.”

Think of sushi: just a few ingredients, rice, vinegar, fish, but treated with such skill and dedication that a thing of alchemical beauty emerges. And now consider, say, a negroni, which is just gin, vermouth and Campari, but here at Royal Bar and indeed at many high-end cocktail bars across Tokyo and the rest of Japan, these simple ingredients are used to create something amazing.

Cocktail culture is huge in Japan. Though, you will rarely find a packed nightclub full of partygoers standing shoulder-to-shoulder at a bar, yelling orders for espresso martinis. Instead what you will discover is intimate spaces like Royal Bar, where jazz tinkles over hidden speakers, drinkers perch on leather-bound stools, and suited bartenders take their time mixing perfect drinks.

Simple ingredients create something amazing.

“Cocktail culture in Japan started in Yokohama because they have the harbour, the port,” Ohtake explains. “And specifically, the culture of Japanese cocktails began [in the late 19th century] at the Yokohama Grand Hotel, where they have a signature cocktail called the Bamboo, a very Japanese cocktail. After World War II, this culture became very popular.”

Royal Bar has played its own vital part in Tokyo’s cocktail scene. Back in the 1960s, the original iteration of this bar, at the original Palace Hotel site, was run by Kiyoshi Imai, a legendary bartender who was known as Mr Martini, such was his dedication to one of the world’s greatest cocktails.

Imai’s legacy spread throughout Tokyo, where areas such as Ginzo, Omotesando, Ebisu and Shinjuku are strewn with tiny bars turning out expertly created, classic cocktails in refined surrounds. His legacy has even more directly been passed to Ohtake, himself an award-winning bartender intent on perfection.

And so I try Ohtake’s whisky sour, where every ingredient is in harmony, presented in a short glass with a large and perfectly clear ice cube. Ohtake also recommends his take on the negroni, where he replaces the gin with shochu, a Japanese spirit that the bartender says is drastically underrated on the world scene.

I also sample his version of the Penicillin, another classic cocktail, this time with apple juice added to acknowledge the autumn season. It’s perfection, of course, draped with a thin slice of apple that Ohtake has patiently, slowly been dehydrating for the past few days.

The sort of technique any sushi master would be proud of.

THE DETAILS

The Royal Bar is in the lobby of the Palace Hotel Tokyo, and is open to hotel guests and the public daily from 3pm until midnight. Rooms at the Palace Hotel Tokyo from $1082 a night. See en.palacehoteltokyo.com

The writer visited as a guest of the Palace Hotel Tokyo