Our Five Sakes at Habibi-san: Snow-Aged to Edo-Style

There are five sakes at Habibi-san. Not fifty, not a bound folder with a ribbon in it — five bottles, printed on one red card that sits under the cocktail menu on your table. We are a Japanese-Middle Eastern charcoal restaurant, not a sake specialist, and a list this size is a series of decisions rather than a collection.

This piece takes those five apart properly: what each one is, what our own list says about it, and what it is actually for at a table covered in smoke and mezze. If you want the mechanics of serving instead — hot versus cold, what glass, what to do when someone hands you the bottle — that is how to drink sake, and it is a separate read on purpose.

What our list actually prints

Worth saying up front, because it changes how you should read everything below: our wine and sake list gives you a name, a country, a number and one line of description per bottle. That is it. It prints no prices at all — not for the sakes, not for the wines, not for anything. It also recommends no serving temperature, suggests no pairings and grades nothing. So when we quote our list below, we are quoting one sentence, and where we go further than that sentence we will say so.

The five are numbered S1 to S5 on the card. In the order they are printed:

S1 — Ginrei Gassan Setchu Jyukusei Junmai Ginjo

Our list calls it “crisp, pure, snow aged sake with gentle aroma and quiet strength.”

The interesting word is the one in the middle of the name. Setchu jyukusei is snow-stored maturation: sake put away to age in a space kept cold by packed snow rather than by a compressor. The point of it is not the novelty, it is the stability — a snow store holds a low, unvarying temperature with no light and very little vibration, and sake aged that way tends to come out rounder and quieter than the same sake aged warm. “Quiet strength” is a fair way to describe what that does. It is not a loud bottle.

This is the one we reach for when someone says they do not really like sake, which usually means they were once handed something hot and rough in a thimble. It is a cold-serve bottle, it does not need food to make sense of it, and it goes with the first ten minutes of a meal — olives, labne, pita — better than anything else on the card.

S2 — Homare Junmai Ginjo Karahashi Black Label

Our list: “lush tropical fruit, pineapple notes, smooth and balanced finish.”

Same two designation words as S1, completely different drink, which is the single most useful thing a five-bottle list can teach you. Junmai ginjo tells you how the rice was milled and that nothing was added; it does not tell you whether the result smells like snow or like pineapple. Here it is emphatically the second. This is the aromatic end of the list — the bottle that announces itself before it reaches the table.

Serve it cold, and be a little careful what you put next to it. Fruit-forward sake and heavy char are not natural allies; this one is much happier alongside the raw and the cured than alongside something that has spent twenty minutes over fire. If you are eating our lamb tartare or the wood-smoked salmon, this is the pour.

S3 — Sakari Matcha Junmai

Our list: “junmai & matcha fusion. Earthy, creamy, bittersweet harmony, distinctly Japanese.”

The odd one out, and the one bottle here that turns up somewhere other than a glass — it is also inside our Matcha-misu dessert and inside one of our cocktails. That is a whole story on its own and we have given it one, in the piece on Sakari Matcha Junmai, so we will not spend it here.

The one thing worth flagging in this context: once something has been added to a sake for flavour, the bottle sits outside the strict designation system whatever the word on the label says. That is not a criticism, it is just how the categories work, and reading a sake label is easier once you know it.

S4 — Hideyoshi Lachamte Sparkling Sake, 280ml

Our list: “bubbly peach and honeysuckle, playful and perfect with dessert.”

Note the number in the name. This is the only bottle on the whole card with a format printed next to it, and 280ml is a small bottle by design — roughly a drink or two rather than something you commit a table to. That makes it the easiest yes on the list. Nobody has to agree with you.

Our list is the one recommending it with dessert and we are not going to argue, because the desserts it is pointing at are real: the muhallebi with soy caramel and the chocolate kataifi tart both take a cold sparkling something better than they take coffee. It is also the bottle to order when a table cannot decide whether it is finished.

S5 — Shirayuki Sake of Edo, Genroku Era

Our list: “amber-hued, nutty and fig-toned sake reviving Edo-era richness and depth.”

This one needs a sentence of history, because “Genroku era” is doing real work in the name. Genroku is a Japanese era name from the closing years of the seventeenth century, inside the long Edo period, and it is shorthand for a particular moment in Japanese urban culture. A bottle presented as an Edo-era style is telling you it is made to an older idea of what sake should taste like — richer, darker, sweeter and further from the pale, polished, aromatic register most people now think of as normal.

Amber, nutty, fig. If you have only ever had cold clear sake, this will not taste like sake to you at first, and that is rather the point of having it on a five-bottle list. It is also the one bottle here that genuinely rewards a little warmth, and the only one we would ever suggest that for.

At a charcoal table it is the natural partner for the heaviest things we cook: the Mangalica pork collar, the lamb rump, anything with real fat and real smoke on it. Sweetness and char have always got on.

Five bottles, five jobs

Read together, the card is less random than it looks. There is a quiet cold one, a loud cold one, a flavoured one, a sparkling one and an old-style one. No two of them do the same job, which is what you want from a short list and is precisely what a long list often fails to deliver.

What we would actually suggest, if you asked us at the table:

Mezze first, everything cold. S1 with the dips and the pickles. It stays out of the way of kinnogomadare and the sesame register generally, which more aromatic sakes do not.
Raw and cured plates. S2, for the fruit against the acidity.
Off the grill. S5, warm if you like, against fat and smoke. Our Brussels sprouts sit oddly well here too, because of the bonito.
Dessert, or the end of the evening. S4, cold, small, done.
Curiosity. S3, and then read the piece about it.

Those are suggestions from the people who cook the food, not rules, and there is no wrong answer on a list of five. You can see what the room and the plates actually look like in our gallery.

What is not on the list, and why that is the honest part

There is no daiginjo and no honjozo here. The most prestigious rung of the ladder and the everyday one are both absent, and both absences are deliberate: five bottles bought for range will always beat five bottles bought for status when the food is this loud. We have written out how that ladder works in how to read a sake label.

Two other absences worth naming, because people ask. We do not pour shochu on its own — it appears exactly once across our whole drinks offering, inside the Aomori Amazeballs cocktail, which is the honest answer we gave in sake versus shochu. And umeshu is not a standalone pour here either; it lives inside one cocktail, and we explain what it actually is in our piece on umeshu.

The practical bits

Prices: we cannot give you any. Our menus do not print them, so ask when you sit down or ask us when you book — and if you want a sense of what an evening here adds up to overall, we have written that out honestly.

Dietary: all five are alcohol, obviously, and our kitchen serves pork. Habibi-san is not halal and never presents itself as such. The rest of the common questions are answered in our FAQ.

And if you want the wider context for why a restaurant like ours keeps a list like this at all, that is the argument in our guide to izakaya dining in Singapore, and in what makes an izakaya authentic once a kitchen starts improvising.

Five bottles is not a boast. It is a promise that somebody chose them. Come and work through them with us — the full list is on our menu page, and you can book a table at 29 Hamilton Road for any evening Tuesday to Sunday.