Boston’s Koji Club Is Here to Shine a Light on the Delights of Sake
For most Americans, sake — and by extension, the sake bar — is enveloped in a certain mystique.
America’s trailblazing sake establishments — sanctuaries like Decibel in New York’s East Village, or its more polished midtown counterpart, Sakagura — introduced generations of Americans to the distinctiveness of sake, but also codified the American sake experience as something otherworldly and clandestine.
The prototypical sake bar was imagined as a hideaway — metaphorically and sometimes literally, too. A sake bar, after all, wasn’t a place you’d just stumble into solo. Usually, you had to know someone — someone who would lead you down a dark, unmarked staircase, perhaps, and guide you through the menu. After all, for most Americans, sake is something ordered blindly, stabs in the darkness of words like yamahai, daiginjo, or shiboritate nama genshu.
After 15 years in the sake business, including more than a dozen operating and developing restaurants like O-Ya, Hojoko, and others for the Cushman Concepts restaurant group, Alyssa Mikiko DiPasquale had spent a lot of time in sake bars across the country and in Japan. She’s spent much of her career navigating this sense of enigma.
In 2020, when DiPasquale quit her job to develop Koji Club, her own sake bar, “every commercial real estate agent I talked to was like, ‘I’ve got the perfect basement for you.’” But DiPasquale had something totally different in mind. “I wanted to open a bar that shined light on sake,” she says, “as much light as humanly possible”.
Koji Club is located in the Charles River Speedway in Brighton, Mass., just west of Boston proper, formerly a complex of horse stables and maintenance cottages built in 1899 to support a recreational racetrack that existed along the Charles River. The racetrack was eventually cleared to make way for Soldier’s Field Road, a much-needed crosstown parkway. And while the Speedway was repurposed — serving, at one point, as a police substation — by 2005 it was largely abandoned and derelict.
When, 15 years later, DiPasquale began looking into the Speedway’s rehabilitation as an upscale marketplace of small, independent food and beverage vendors, this nondescript stretch of auto repair shops and industrial buildings wasn’t an obvious setting for a sake bar. Beyond walking distance from any college campus and removed from downtown or Back Bay, Brighton was “a no-man’s land with no public transportation or foot traffic,” she says.
But then, the pandemic happened.
Schools closed, offices shut down, and “all of a sudden, everything was home-centric,” she explains. While downtown Boston turned into a ghost town, Brighton, just minutes away from the near-in towns of Watertown, Cambridge, Sommerville, and Brookline, revealed itself as a unique intersection of highly dense residential neighborhoods. The Speedway became just the kind of place to attract “beverage-curious people who typically don’t know a lot about sake but want to learn more,” suggests Claire Makley, Koji Club’s director of operations.
The club is just a compact 250 square feet, but it’s a breezy, welcoming space that’s bathed in sunlight till dusk and candlelit at night. Legally, it seats just 16 people but when the weather allows, a designated patio adds an additional 24 seats.
The concept is by design open and engaging, says DiPasquale. There’s no mystique, no secret handshake. Koji Club doesn’t need the cosplay of a counterculture hideaway or a frenzied, sake-fueled dance party. It’s not trying to transport you to New York City or Tokyo.
Instead, it’s a refreshingly Brighton-level chill. Most weeknights, Koji Club feels like it could be a “corner pub for neighborhood regulars,” says Makley. Weekends are primetime, but warm-weather Sundays when the bar opens at 2 p.m. are popular too, especially for families who lounge outside on the patio, or the communal tables in the courtyard, kids in tow. Last summer, they went through a ton of popsicles from Wild Pops in Jamaica Plain, served, for adults at least, in a wine glass doused with Heiwa Shuzo’s Tsuru Ume Natsu Mikan, sake infused with the juice and peels of Japanese summer oranges.
Initially, “most people walk in wildly apprehensive about sake,” Makley continues. “They’re so apologetic about not knowing anything about sake, or asking stupid questions.” Thus the goal of Koji Club is to offer “tiny, highly personalized experiences” so that anyone can feel confident about sake. DiPasquale is adamant about this approach.
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The nucleus of Koji Bar is its tiny, eight-seat bar where conversations between guests inevitably merge into one, says Makley: “Everyone usually ends up friends there,” sharing stories about recent trips to Japan, or offering suggestions on upcoming itineraries. But almost always, says Makley, the conversation shifts at some point into a deep dive about sake. It can get geeky, DiPasquale admits, but you don’t need to know much to get really, really excited about sake when seated there.
Koji Club offers upwards of 80 different bottles at a time, but guests are never faced with an almanac of rice milling ratios, classifications, and cultivars. There’s no pressure to order a bottle; DiPasquale and her team happily offer small pours of anything. “We’ll taste you to death until you find that one thing you really like,” she says.
Koji Club’s approach is to lead with stories behind sake, the places, the brewers, and the farmers who grow rice. Even DiPasquale’s tasting notes are bite-sized vignettes: “Big Sumo Energy (the fruit, not the wrestling), coco lopez, lychee.” Indeed, “Alyssa is so passionate about sake, she can’t help talking about it like she’s talking about her boyfriend,” teases Moe Kuroki, Koji Club’s chef.
While the sake list offers a few familiar classics, the greater part of DiPasquale’s selections evidence a feel for the pulse of evolving trends both here and in Japan. The landscape of sake today, after all, is far more varied and inventive than the stuff of college-era sake bombs or the handful of brand-forward, super-premium sakes you might have encountered. (If you’ve heard of Dassai, you’ve encountered one of these.) DiPasquale is particularly adept at weaving together styles of sake that are more typically treated as esoterica. There’s a spotlight on non-Japanese brews from local producers like Farthest Star Brewery in nearby Medfield, a nod to the steadily progressing American sake movement.
But her sake menu also puts emphasis on the wide spectrum of koshu, or aged sake, whether the focused purity of Hakkaisan’s Yukimuro, aged three years in snow, to Wakaze’s Barrel sake, a quirky Parisian sake made from French rice and matured in whisky barrels. Whether your taste in fizz runs more towards pét-nat or Champagne, you’ll find evidence of the evolving category of sparkling sake here, too. And for those curious about the effects of yeasts on sake’s taste and texture, she offers selections like Kawatsuru’s Olive, a rich, peppery junmai fermented with olive yeasts.
There’s no starry-eyed reverence for the typical marquee of amped up prestige bottlings here — sake made from rice grains polished down so low they’ve crossed the threshold of meaningful. But if you’re in the mood to splurge, the menu’s Treat Yourself section is devoted to 2-ounce pours of unique rarities like Tatenokawa’s Nehan Black, a vintage junmai daiginjo made from Soube Wase, a rare heritage rice strain only recently restored to production. Or Honda Shoten’s Tatsuriki Akitsu, an aged junmai daiginjo made from yamada nishiki rice from a single grower in Akitsu, a subregion of Hyogo’s famed Special A District — the closest thing the sake world has to a grand cru vineyard.
In contrast to Boston’s passel of $300 omakase joints, the food at Koji Club is “just a bar-snack menu,” explains DiPasquale, helmed by Kuroki, who closed her popular noodle bar, Oisa Ramen, in 2020. Due to Koji Club’s limited food permit, the kitchen consists of just an oversized countertop toaster that the team refer to as Colette (the no-nonsense chef in Disney’s “Ratatouille”) and Zoe, their steadfast Zojirushi-brand rice steamer.
The menu is simple, the kind of snacky bites and homey fare served in any of Japan’s ramshackle, similarly kitchen-deficient yokocho bars. At the same time, Kuroki says, “we’re very picky about using only the highest quality products.”
Hence, Koji Club uses only select varieties of super-premium rice imported from Japan and milled in small batches by The Rice Factory in New York, served with pickled plums and kelp, or doused in broth as an ochazuke. Castelvetrano olives are dusted with a shichimi togarashi fragrant with sansho and yuzu peel, and drizzled with a flax-colored sesame oil so light and airy, it really should be sipped after the olives are gone. At $85, their caviar service might seem extravagant, but it’s an entire 30-gram tin of Island Creek caviar served with crème fraîche and Calbee-brand norishio, or seaweed-and-salt potato chips — a bargain considering the tin itself sells for more on Island Creek’s retail website.
The kitchen consists of just an oversized countertop toaster that the team refer to as Colette (the no-nonsense chef in Disney’s “Ratatouille”) and Zoe, their steadfast Zojirushi-brand rice steamer.
On Wednesday nights, Kuroki offers makanai, or family meal, for $49. The three-course meal consists of miso soup, salad, and rice with a rotating selection of mains — Japanese curry rice, croquettes, or a salmon poke, for example. It’s “the kind of food I grew up eating and what I feed my kids today,” says Kuroki. When prompted to reveal the secret of her miso soup — that day, a fragrant, earthy broth with crunchy bites of bamboo and nanohana, or rapeseed blossoms — Kuroki smiles and places a packet of freeze-dried miso soup from Kayanoya, the specialty dashi retailer in Kyushu, on the counter. There’s no secret here, just something remarkably simple — yet exceptional. In the winter, DiPasquale, adds, it might be served spiked with a dash of Yuho’s umami-rich Eternal Embers sake.
After all, DiPasquale and her team are big believers in sake going with food. Unsure what sake will pair with a dish? Ask any of the staff and you’ll unleash a giddy torrent of suggestions. The Mantensei Kinoko, a mushroom-inspired junmai ginjo with spring ramps or asparagus! A summer-sweet tomato with Mukai Shuzo’s Ine Mankai, the rosé-hued junmai made from heirloom red rice! Yet the approach shies away from anything that feels too precious or too studied. It’s clear that the Koji Club is meant to be a playground for sake lovers, not a study.
Indeed, in this unexpected haven for sake, so much feels so unexpectedly easy and illuminated. After all, DiPasquale says, sake was never meant to be a secret.
