Sakari Matcha Junmai: One Sake, a Dessert and a Cocktail

Most bottles in a restaurant do one job. You pour them, people drink them, that is the end of the relationship. One bottle at Habibi-san does three, and it turns up on three different menus to do them: on the sake list as a pour, in a dessert on the food menu, and inside a cocktail on the drinks menu.

That bottle is the Sakari Matcha Junmai, and it is the most-travelled thing we stock. Here is where it goes and what it does when it gets there.

What it actually is

Our wine and sake list describes it in one line: “junmai & matcha fusion. Earthy, creamy, bittersweet harmony, distinctly Japanese.” It sits third of five on the card, numbered S3.

Unpacking that: junmai is the designation meaning the sake is made from rice, water, koji and yeast with no distilled alcohol added. The matcha is the departure. Somebody has taken a junmai and brought powdered green tea into it, which produces exactly what you would expect and exactly what our list says — something earthy and creamy where a plain junmai would be clean and grainy, with the particular bittersweetness that matcha carries everywhere it goes.

Worth being straight about a technicality, because it is the sort of thing a label nerd will raise: once something is added to a sake for flavour, the bottle steps outside the strict designation grid, whatever word is on the front. That grid, and why it is more useful as a starting point than as a verdict, is the whole subject of how to read a sake label. It is not a mark against the bottle. It just means the word junmai here is a description of the base, not a certificate for the finished thing.

One: the pour

Ordered as a drink, this is the strangest bottle on our five-sake list and the one people either love immediately or hand straight back. It is not refreshing. It is not what you want with the first plate of pita and labne, and it will fight anything acidic you put near it.

What it does suit is the back half of an evening, when the grill has done its work and the table has slowed down. Cold, small pour, after the heavy plates rather than alongside them. If you have ever finished a meal with a matcha and thought the idea was sound but the timing was wrong, this is that instinct with the alcohol put back in.

Two: the dessert

Our food menu prints a dessert called Matcha-misu — the hyphen is on the menu, and the joke is doing exactly what you think it is. The ingredient line reads: sakari matcha sake, 100% arabica coffee, hazelnut feuilletine.

That is the same bottle, named outright. And it is a genuinely neat piece of construction, because of what a tiramisu normally is: sponge soaked in coffee and a fortified wine or a liqueur, layered with mascarpone. Take the fortified wine out and put a matcha sake in, and you have not made a novelty — you have swapped one soaking alcohol for another that happens to bring the green-tea bitterness with it. The coffee stays. The bitterness comes from two directions instead of one.

We have written the dessert up properly on its own in the Matcha-misu piece, and it sits inside the wider question of where matcha desserts are worth eating in Singapore if you want the comparison.

Three: the cocktail

On the drinks menu there is a cocktail called Matcha Milk. Our own description of it is one line long and entirely unpretentious: “matcha latte with alcohol—what more can you ask for?”

The build, as printed: matcha sake, butterscotch, hazelnut, cream liquer.

Two notes on that line. The first is a typo and it is ours: the menu spells it “liquer”, and it does the same thing twice more elsewhere on the same card — while spelling liqueur correctly one line above one of the errors. We are quoting the menu as printed rather than tidying it up, the same way we do with the Brussel sprouts. It is on the list to fix.

The second note is about naming, and it matters more. The cocktail menu says “matcha sake”. It does not name the bottle. The Sakari is the only matcha sake we stock, and the dessert on the other menu names it in full, so the inference is a short one — but it is an inference, and we would rather tell you that than write a sentence that sounds more certain than our own paperwork.

The menu also gives every signature cocktail a set of flavour tags. This one carries sweet, creamy, decadent and strength. Those are tags, not measurements; we are not going to convert them into numbers we have not measured.

The hazelnut that turns up twice

Here is something you only notice if you put the two menus side by side, which almost nobody does. The dessert finishes with hazelnut feuilletine. The cocktail lists hazelnut in its build. Same bottle, same nut, two different courses, written by the same kitchen at the same time.

Matcha and hazelnut is not an accident anywhere it appears — the tea’s grassy bitterness and a roasted nut cover for each other’s weaknesses, which is why the pairing has been quietly everywhere for years. What is unusual is doing it twice in one building, once solid and once liquid, off one bottle. If you order the Matcha-misu and the Matcha Milk together you are eating and drinking the same idea in two states of matter. We recommend it, and we recognise how that sentence sounds.

What we cannot tell you

Two honest gaps. We cannot quote you a price for the pour, the dessert or the cocktail, because none of our Hamilton Road menus print prices at all — not the food menu, not the drinks menu, not the wine and sake list. Ask at the table, or read what dinner here actually costs for the shape of an evening.

And we are not going to give you an alcohol percentage for the bottle. Our list does not print one, we have not measured it, and a number invented for the sake of completeness is worse than an admission.

How to do all three in one evening

If you want the full circuit, the order that works is not the order we have written them in. Start with something else entirely — one of the cold, clean sakes off the list while the mezze is landing, because the Sakari is no good as an opener. Eat the grill. Then take the Matcha-misu and the Matcha Milk together at the end, and if you are still curious, ask for the Sakari on its own afterwards so you can taste the base underneath both of them.

That last step is the one worth doing. Tasting the raw material after you have had it twice in disguise is a small, cheap piece of education, and it is the sort of thing a counter seat is for — which is an argument we make at greater length in our guide to izakaya dining.

The serving side of sake generally — cold, warm, what glass, what not to do — is covered in how to drink sake, and if you are still working out where sake sits against the other Japanese drinks on our list, start with sake versus shochu.

One dietary note, since a dessert and a cocktail are involved and people do ask: everything above contains alcohol, and our kitchen serves pork. Habibi-san is not halal. The rest of the usual questions are answered plainly in our FAQ.

You can see the room, the counter and the plates in our gallery, the full food list on our menu page and the cocktails on the drinks menu. When you want to try the bottle three ways, book a table at 29 Hamilton Road — we are open Tuesday to Sunday from 5pm.