What Is Kinnogomadare? Japan’s Golden Sesame Sauce, Explained

The word turns up twice on our food menu — once under the Brussel sprouts, once under the babaganoush — and if you have tried to look it up, you will have found very little. Here is the whole thing, from the name outwards.

The name, taken apart

Read it as three pieces: kin no goma dare.

Kin is gold. No is the possessive particle, the Japanese equivalent of an apostrophe-s. Goma is sesame. Tare is the broad word for a poured or dipping sauce — the same tare that gets brushed onto yakitori. When tare follows another word inside a compound it softens to dare, which is a regular feature of the language called sequential voicing; the same thing turns hito into bito in hitobito. So: golden sesame sauce.

We print it closed up as one word, which is a menu habit rather than a rule. If you are searching for the family it belongs to, goma dare is the term that will actually return results.

What goma dare is

Goma dare is one of the standard sauces of the Japanese table, and its home turf is the shabu-shabu pot: a bowl of it sits next to the ponzu, and you drag cooked meat and vegetables through one or the other. Outside the hotpot it dresses cold noodles, blanched greens, steamed chicken and salad.

The base is roasted sesame — seeds toasted dark and ground to a paste — loosened with soy sauce, rice vinegar and something sweet, with dashi for depth. The result is thick, pourable, nutty, savoury, faintly sweet, and much rounder than the sum of those parts suggests. Most people outside Japan have met it in bottled form; the roasted-sesame dressing Kewpie sells is the version that made it a supermarket staple rather than a restaurant one.

What we make in our kitchen is our own build and we do not publish it, in the same way we do not publish the toum or the mentaiko XO. What we will tell you is what it is doing.

Why sesame is the right sauce for burnt vegetables

Almost everything in our kitchen goes over charcoal. Charring does two things to a vegetable: it concentrates the sugars, and it lays down a genuinely bitter layer on the outside. That bitterness is the point — it is also the thing that will wear you out by the sixth mouthful if nothing is there to catch it.

Sesame catches it. Roasted sesame is itself slightly bitter, so it meets char on its own terms instead of masking it, and it brings fat and salt, which is what charred vegetables are always asking for. A sauce built on cream or butter would flatten the smoke. A vinaigrette would sharpen it in the wrong direction. Goma dare sits exactly in the middle, which is why it ends up under the two most charred things we serve.

Where it lands on our menu

Two dishes at Hamilton Road.

Habibi’s Brussel Sprouts — kinnogomadare, red cabbage pickles, jalapenos, shredded bonito. This is the one everybody writes about, and we have taken it apart component by component in its own piece.

Babaganoush — smoked eggplant, kinnogomadare, roasted sesame seeds, tempura, togarashi. This is the more interesting appearance, because babaganoush is traditionally a Levantine dip built on tahini, and tahini is also a sesame paste. Swapping one sesame paste for another sounds like nothing on paper. On the plate it moves the dip several thousand kilometres east: the sourness recedes, the soy and dashi push forward, and the smoked eggplant suddenly reads closer to a Japanese aubergine dish than a Lebanese one. That dip has its own piece now, on the eggplant itself and what the fire does to it.

Our Haji Lane sibling runs the sauce on its own sprouts and its own babaganoush too, with a chicken-skin crisp in place of the tempura. Li’l Habibi is a different room with a different fire; the sauce travels, the dish does not.

Two sesame pastes, one restaurant

This is the hinge of how we cook, so it is worth saying directly. The Middle East grinds sesame into tahini and puts it in hummus, in babaganoush, in halva. Japan grinds sesame into a paste and turns it into goma dare and into goma-ae, the sauce for dressed spinach. Two cuisines, one seed, entirely different destinations.

A restaurant that cooks both can move between them at will, and the joins do not show, because the raw material was the same all along. That is why our hummus arrives with a macadamia tahini and our sprouts arrive with goma dare, and why neither one feels like a gimmick when it hits the table.

How it sits against the rest of the mezze

A mezze spread only works if the dips disagree with each other. Ours are built to: the hummus is cool and dense and finished with salmon roe, the labne is sour and dairy, the matbucha is sweet-sharp stewed tomato and pepper, and the cassava and taramasalata is salty, fishy and fermented. Drop goma dare into that spread and it takes the smoky, toasted, savoury corner that nothing else on the table is occupying.

Which is the whole reason the sauce is on a Middle Eastern-looking menu at all. It is not there because Japanese ingredients are fashionable. It is there because a table of Levantine dips has a gap in it exactly the shape of roasted sesame and soy, and we have been filling gaps like that since 2020 — the long version of that is in five years of Habibi-san.

What it is not

Three quick corrections, because all three come up.

It is not tahini. Tahini is ground sesame and nothing else; goma dare is a finished, seasoned sauce with soy, vinegar and sweetness in it.

It is not sesame oil. Sesame oil is pressed and aromatic and used in drops. This is a body sauce, used by the spoonful.

It is not a peanut sauce. It gets mistaken for satay sauce constantly because both are thick, beige and nutty. There are no peanuts in it, there is no coconut, and it is not hot.

Trying it

Both dishes it appears on are near the front of the menu, and both are cheap ways to work out whether the way we cook is for you. Order the sprouts and the babaganoush together and you will taste the same sauce doing two different jobs in the same sitting, which is a better introduction to this kitchen than anything we could write.

The full list is on the menu, the dishes people actually keep ordering are in this piece, and there are photographs of the grill it all comes off in the gallery. We are at 29 Hamilton Road, Singapore 209198, Tuesday to Sunday from 5pm — book a table.