Arak vs Sake: How Two Cultures Do Dinner Drinks

We do not pour arak. Not a bottle of it, not a splash of it in a cocktail, not as a house digestif. We checked this properly before writing rather than trusting memory: the word does not appear on our food menu, our wine and sake card or our cocktails and drinks card, and neither does ouzo, raki or pastis. Zero hits across all three documents.

That is now the third time this series has ended up arguing for a drink we cannot sell you, after the shochu highball and the Japanese one, so we will not labour the pattern again. What makes this one worth writing anyway is that arak and sake are the two drinks sitting at the exact centre of what we do. We are a Japanese–Middle Eastern restaurant. These are the two dinner-table drinks of those two food cultures. The comparison is our own subject even when the bottles are not on our shelf.

What arak is

An anise-flavoured grape spirit from the Levant, distilled and then drunk diluted. For the production detail we are quoting a producer rather than a summary, because a restaurant blog inventing distillation facts is exactly how bad information spreads. Domaine des Tourelles, a Lebanese producer in the Bekaa Valley, publishes the process on its own site, and we read it on 3 September 2026.

The spirit base is grape. Their ten-year bottling, in their words, draws its "grape alcohol" from "very old Obeidi vines grown in terraces, a native grape to Lebanon." The flavour is anise: "Anise is a splendid spice rich in aromas and native to some Eastern Mediterranean terroirs. It is the main ingredient behind arak’s unique flavor and white cloud color when mixed with water."

The distilling is the interesting part. They run "a large series of centuries-old copper alembics with relatively small pots", and the run is repeated: "This distillation process is repeated three times… where anise is added in the last stage. The recipe entails that we remove every time the heads and tails of the liquid in order to only keep the hearts." Then it goes into clay. Their classic bottling ages roughly a year in traditional Lebanese clay jars, with five- and ten-year expressions on top of that, and their reasoning is that clay "can breathe thanks to its slightly porous surface".

And the serving instruction, which is the bit that actually matters at a dinner table: "The classic way to pour neat and then to add ice-cold water."

What sake is

Rice, water and koji, brewed rather than distilled. For the category facts we are leaning on the Japan Sake and Shochu Makers Association, the industry’s own body, read the same day. Their twelve-point summary includes the two lines that make the contrast with arak sharp: sake "Is brewed, not distilled" and "Can be served at a range of temperatures."

On strength, their FAQ is refreshingly blunt about why the number is what it is. Fermentation in sake brewing "can produce a drink with over 20% alcohol content. However, 20% is slightly too strong for general consumption. Therefore, the alcohol content is usually adjusted with water to around 15%, so the final product can be more enjoyable with meals."

Read that sentence again with arak in mind and the whole comparison falls out of it. (What we will not do is put an ABV against any of our own five bottles, because our card prints none — that, and the storage question, is its own FAQ.)

The actual difference: where the water goes in

Both of these are drinks built to be consumed with food across a long meal, and both of them get there by dilution. They just do it at opposite ends of the process.

Arak is distilled up to a strength no one would drink at the table, and then the water is added by the person drinking it, in the glass, in front of everyone, and the drink visibly changes colour when they do it. The clouding is a piece of theatre that happens at your table, repeatedly, all night.

Sake is brewed to a strength that overshoots slightly, and then the water is added by the brewery, before it is ever bottled, specifically so that the drink arrives at the table already sized for a meal. The adjustment is invisible and the intent is identical.

One culture solved the meal-strength problem in the glass. The other solved it in the brewery. Both arrived at a drink you can keep going with for three hours without falling over, which is what a table of small plates demands.

Why they both work with the same kind of food

Our own kitchen is the obvious test case, because a table here genuinely does carry both traditions at once. Cold, sharp, sesame-heavy dips at one end; things off the charcoal grill at the other.

Anise and fat is one of the oldest correct ideas in Mediterranean eating. A diluted arak has the aromatic lift to cut through lamb, tahini and olive oil without the sugar of a cocktail or the tannin of a red. Sake does the same job from a different direction: it is "less acidic and has more ‘umami’ than wine", in the association’s own phrasing, which is why it sits so easily next to soy, miso, roe and smoke where a wine has to work harder. We went through that dish by dish in our sake and mezze post.

Neither is an aperitif culture. Neither is a cocktail culture. Both are what you drink during, which is the single thing they have most obviously in common and the thing that gets lost when either is written up as an exotic curiosity.

Where they part company

Temperature. Arak is a cold drink, full stop — ice-cold water, ice in the glass, no version of it that is served warm. Sake covers a range most drinks do not: the association’s FAQ puts most sake anywhere "from 15°C to over 50°C", and warming it, in their words, "brings out the sweetness and umami of sake, enhances food paired with it". That is a genuinely enormous amount of adjustability inside one bottle, and it is why how you order sake matters more than which sake you order.

Sweetness perception is the other split. Arak is bone dry and reads as dry because the anise carries no sugar with it. Sake’s dryness is a much slipperier thing — the same FAQ admits outright that "a dry sake can be difficult to define", because acidity and sweetness both feed into it. If you like dry drinks, arak will behave exactly as you expect. Sake may not, and that is not the sake being difficult, it is the word being imprecise. Reading the label helps more than the word "dry" does.

So what can you actually drink here

The sake half of this post you can order. We keep five, and we wrote all of them up in the sake list post. If you want the closest thing on our card to the arak half — a clear, aromatic, herbal, non-sweet drink to have with mezze — the honest nearest neighbour is Ume & Bitter, built from gin, gentian, umeshu and pink perilla. Gentian and perilla are doing an anise-adjacent job: bitter, aromatic, no sugar to speak of. It is not arak and we are not going to pretend it is a substitute. It is the drink on our list that is trying to solve the same problem.

For everything else on how the two families of spirits relate, sake versus shochu is the companion piece to this one.

And plainly, since a post about a Levantine spirit will raise it: we serve pork and we serve alcohol, so we are not halal and have never claimed to be. That and the rest of the practical questions are in our FAQ.

Come and eat the food both of these drinks were built for. We are at 29 Hamilton Road, Tuesday to Sunday, 5pm to 11pm — the room is in the gallery, the bottles are on the wine and sake list, and the table is here. If you want the wider picture of what an evening like this is meant to be, start with our izakaya guide.