![]() ![]() Just as many of the early craft cocktail bars sometimes over-emphasized the formal aspects of mixology, Japanese-style bars have taken some time extracting themselves from their model, with early examples feeling a bit textbook and chilly in their adherence to tradition. These drinks, paired with Urushido’s buoyant approach to hospitality, illustrate the importance of Katana in the still-young Japanese bar movement in the U.S. The rosy dust sitting on the surface is dehydrated Okinawan purple sweet potato. Those ingredients deliver delicate notes of fruit, nuts, sweet and funk, a complex but yet somehow quiet riot of flavor. It reads like adult breakfast cereal: potato shochu, arrack, coconut orgeat, puffed rice, banana, cocoa nibs and lemon. Cool Runnings, Urushido’s Japanese spin on a Mai Tai, is another. That sour is a good example of what Katana does well, proffering flavorful and charmingly inventive eastern spins on western drinks without undue ostentation. This Japanese-inflected version, sprinkled with yukari-salted and sundried red shiso leaves, generally used as seasoning for rice-is a further improvement on the once-lowly cocktail. Like Portland bartender Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s famous version of the drink, the amaretto here is bumped up in power and flavor by the addition of rye whiskey. A different plucking from that same garden, red shiso, goes into the Amaretto Sour, alongside a slightly saline Japanese plum shrub. When in season, from June to October, the drink rests in the cooling shade of an enormous shiso leaf from Urushido’s Brooklyn garden. The Shiso Gin & Tonic, for instance, is made with intensely lime-bright homemade “shiso-quinine syrup,” which is on draft. (There are also wines by the glass, sake and beer.) Upon each drink are lavished personal touches that take them beyond the ordinary. The bar’s menu is a model of straightforward simplicity, divided between highballs, cocktails and boilermakers-five of each. “Katana Kitten is everyone’s everyday bar,” explains Urushido. It’s a silly name that immediately disarms any nervous patron new to the Japanese bar aesthetic. ![]() (His co-owners are Greg Boehm and James Tune, both of Boilermaker in the East Village.) The name of the bar itself telegraphs Urushido’s earnest/casual intentions-“katana” being a name for a samurai sword and “kitten” a reference to a very different Japanese tradition: Hello Kitty. It is no surprise then that after leaving his long-time post as head bartender at Saxon & Parole, Urushido-who was born in a small town in the Nagano prefecture in Japan, and has been working in restaurants and bars since he was a teenager-opened one of the most welcoming cocktail bars in the city. ![]()
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