Bar · May 2026 · 6 min read
Sake 101: how to order at our Clapham bar.
Junmai versus daiginjo, hot versus cold, and the three sakes worth ordering on your first visit.
Sake is intimidating until you've ordered three. Then it's just sake. Here's the framework we'd give a guest who's never picked a bottle before.
Sake breaks into a few main categories based on how much the rice has been polished before brewing. Junmai is the standard, junmai ginjo is more refined, junmai daiginjo is the most refined. The polishing percentage determines the style — the more you polish, the cleaner and more delicate the result. Junmai is rounder, ginjo is fragrant, daiginjo is precise.
Temperature changes everything. Daiginjo and ginjo styles are best chilled (5–10°C) — heat kills the aromatics. Junmai and honjozo styles are good at room temperature or gently warmed. Anything labelled futsu (table sake) is fine warm in winter and chilled in summer. We serve every sake at our recommended temperature unless you ask otherwise.
Three to try on your first visit. The Dassai 45 (junmai daiginjo) is the safest premium pour — clean, fruity, easy to drink, perfect with sushi. The Born Tokusen (junmai daiginjo) is more elegant and aromatic, the bottle to bring if you're toasting something. The Hakkaisan honjozo is the least flashy and the most useful — drinks well at any temperature, sits with everything on the menu.
How to read the menu. We list by category (junmai → ginjo → daiginjo), with the rice polishing percentage and the brewery's prefecture. Lower polishing number means more polished rice. Smaller bottle (180ml or 300ml) is for one person; larger bottle (720ml or 1.8L) is for the table. Pricing scales with the polishing — daiginjo is the most labour-intensive to make.
If you don't want to order from the list, ask the bar for a recommendation. We'll ask three things: what you're eating, whether you usually like white or red wine (white-wine drinkers tend to like ginjo; red-wine drinkers tend to like junmai), and how much you want to spend. Then we'll pour something we'd drink ourselves.
The omakase sake pairing (£55) is the lazy answer. Five 60ml pours, picked to match the courses, with the chef explaining each one as it lands. It's how most regulars learn what they actually like.
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