Cocktail Spotlight: L.S.M. and Aomori Amazeballs

These are the last two drinks on our signature cocktail card, and they are the only two on it that lead with the same word. Every drink carries a four-tag flavour profile, and out of eight drinks exactly two open with FRUITY: L.S.M. and Aomori Amazeballs.

They are also, between them, the most and least explained drinks we pour. One gets a four-word description. The other gets a prefecture. Here is what is actually in both, read off the card at 29 Hamilton Road.

L.S.M. — lychee liquer, gin, sake

The build is three ingredients. The description, in full, is: “Lychee martini, but better.”

Four words. It is the shortest line on the entire card, and we have some sympathy with whoever wrote it, because there is not much to hide behind. The flavour tags are FRUITY · SWEET · FLORAL · STRENGTH, drawn as dots on a scale bar we are not going to convert into numbers.

The lychee martini is a drink with a reputation, most of it earned in the wrong decade. The version people remember is sweet to the point of being a dessert, usually built on a syrupy liqueur and not much else. Adding gin puts a spine back into it — juniper is aromatic and dry and it argues with the sugar rather than agreeing with it. Adding sake does something different again: it softens the whole thing and lengthens the finish, because sake carries body without carrying the burn of a second spirit.

That is the argument the four words are making. Whether it lands is a matter for your own glass.

The one ingredient our own paperwork will not identify

There is a small mystery in this build and we would rather flag it than paper over it.

Sake appears in two of our eight cocktails. In Matcha Milk the card says matcha sake, which narrows it to one bottle on our list — an inference we set out carefully in the post on the Sakari Matcha Junmai rather than stating as fact. In L.S.M. the card says, simply, sake. No qualifier at all.

We carry five sakes and have written about all of them: a snow-aged junmai ginjo, a black-label junmai ginjo, the matcha one, a sparkling, and an Edo-era style. Any of them could be the one in this glass and the card gives us nothing to choose between them. So we are not going to name it. If you want to know, ask at the bar, where somebody actually knows the answer.

And lychee is not from either of our two cuisines

Worth saying out loud, since this blog spends most of its time on the seam between Japanese and Middle Eastern cooking: lychee is neither. It is a southern Chinese fruit that spread through Southeast Asia long before anyone in Singapore called anything fusion, and it turns up here in June and July in every wet market on the island.

Which makes L.S.M. the one drink on the card that is local rather than borrowed from either parent cuisine. We are a Japanese-Middle Eastern kitchen in Singapore, and this is the ingredient that remembers the third part of that sentence. We would rather admit that than reverse-engineer a heritage story for it.

Aomori Amazeballs — aomori apple, shochu, soda

The build again is three ingredients, and the description is much longer: “Crisp Aomori apple meets smooth shochu and light soda. Clean, bright, and elegantly balanced.” Tags: FRUITY · REFRESHING · SWEET · STRENGTH.

Aomori is a real place doing real work in that sentence. It is the prefecture at the northern tip of Honshu, and it is where most of Japan’s apples come from. Aomori’s own official travel guide puts it plainly: apples grown there “make up over 50% of the apple market of Japan”, and in 2012 the prefecture’s crop exceeded 446,000 tons, roughly 56% of the domestic market. The same page notes that of the 14,898 tons of apples Japan exported, 90% were grown in Aomori. Later figures put the share nearer 60%; we are quoting the ones the prefecture publishes itself.

Naming the prefecture rather than the fruit is the same move a wine list makes when it names a region instead of a grape. It tells you the apple was chosen, not defaulted to. What the card does not say is what form the apple arrives in — juice, purée, liqueur — and we are not going to guess on your behalf.

The only shochu we pour, and no soju at all

Aomori Amazeballs is the single shochu on either Hamilton Road menu. There is no shochu poured neat, no shochu highball as a listed drink, and no soju anywhere on the paperwork. That is an odd enough fact that it earned two posts of its own: sake versus shochu, on how the two are actually made, and shochu versus soju, on why the two most-confused bottles in Asia are not the same drink. We are not going to rerun either argument here.

The practical version, for ordering purposes: shochu is distilled, cleaner and drier than sake, and it disappears into a mixer in a way a heavier spirit will not. Apple, shochu and soda is a long, cold, low-sweetness drink. It is the closest thing we pour to something you can keep drinking through a whole meal, which is exactly the job a highball does next to grill food.

The third “liquer”

L.S.M.’s build prints lychee liquer. That is the third of three misspellings of liqueur on the same card, and the house rule holds: reproduce what is printed, name it as a typo, do not silently correct it into a quote that does not exist. The full set — including the one that appears one line below the correct spelling in the same font — is in the post on the S.S.S. and Habibi’s Espresso Martini.

How to order them

Aomori Amazeballs is the all-evening drink of the two. Low in sweetness for something tagged SWEET, long, and cold enough to reset your palate between a smoky plate and the next one. Order it first and keep it.

L.S.M. is a short drink and behaves like one. It is best somewhere in the middle of a meal, or at the end instead of dessert if you would rather drink your sugar than eat it. It is not the thing to be holding when the grill section arrives.

Both of them are drinks you order for yourself, which is worth saying because in Japan the first thing on your table often is not. Otoshi, the small dish that arrives whether you asked for it or not, is the one izakaya custom we do not import — nothing lands at our tables that you did not choose.

That completes the card. The other three pairs, in order: Olive or Nothing and Levant, S.S.S. and Habibi’s Espresso Martini, and Ume & Bitter and Matcha Milk. If cocktails are not the plan, what to drink alongside a chef’s-choice menu is a better starting point.

Booking, and the honest line

We are at 29 Hamilton Road, Singapore 209198, in Jalan Besar. Open Tuesday to Sunday, 5pm to 11pm, plus brunch on Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 2.30pm. Closed Mondays. Book on Chope or via our reservations page.

Both drinks contain alcohol and our kitchen serves pork. Habibi-san is not halal and we say so plainly rather than leaving you to work it out at the table — the FAQ has the rest. The whole card is on the cocktails and drinks menu, the room is in the gallery, and our izakaya guide is the place to start if none of this is familiar yet.