Sake Pairings for Hummus, Babaganoush and Grilled Lamb

Sake with hummus sounds like a stunt. It is not, and the reason is structural rather than clever.

Most wine pairing runs on acid. You put something sharp next to something fat and the sharpness cuts through. Sake does not really work that way — it is a brewed rice drink, and what it brings to a table is savouriness rather than sharpness. Which turns out to matter here, because a Middle Eastern mezze board is not short of acid. Lemon is already in the room. What the board actually has too much of is fat and sesame: tahini, yoghurt, olive oil, browned butter, smoked eggplant. That is a problem sake is unusually well shaped for.

Our card carries five of them, printed on the same page as the wine. Here is what we would do with each one against the dips and the grill. The bottles themselves — where they come from, what they are — are written up in our sake list; this post is only about what to put them next to. And if you want the other half of the argument, the same table done with wine is a separate post.

Hummus, and why the snow-aged one

Our chickpea hummus is dressed with macadamia tahini and topped with ikura. It is heavier than most hummus because macadamia is a fatter nut than sesame, and it is saltier than most hummus because of the roe.

Pour the Ginrei Gassan Setchu Jyukusei Junmai Ginjo, which the card describes as "Crisp, pure, snow aged sake with gentle aroma and quiet strength." Two of those words are doing the work. "Crisp" handles the fat. "Quiet" matters more: ikura is delicate and salty and an aromatic bottle would trample it. Sake and salmon roe is one of the oldest pairings there is, and this is the version of it that happens to be sitting on a Lebanese dip.

The same bottle is our answer to labne with smoked shimeji — housemade strained yoghurt, taklia, garlic crisps and peppermint. Yoghurt and rice brew are both quietly lactic. They do not argue.

Babaganoush, and the fruit-against-smoke move

Babaganoush here is smoked eggplant with kinnogomadare, roasted sesame seeds, tempura and togarashi. Smoke on smoke on sesame. It is the most assertive thing on the mezze section and it flattens a lot of drinks.

Pour the Homare Junmai Ginjo Karahashi Black Label: "Lush tropical fruit, pineapple notes, smooth and balanced finish." The instinct with a smoky dish is to reach for something equally smoky, and it is usually the wrong instinct — two smokes cancel into mud. Fruit against smoke is the better move, and the pineapple note in this bottle reads as sweetness without any actual sugar arriving. It does the same job for kibbeh nayyeh, our Margra lamb tartare, which is already dressed with shio kombu and wasabi ponzu and is therefore half a Japanese dish before the sake gets there.

Grilled lamb: the one that needs the Edo bottle

This is the pairing people expect to fail, and it is the one we would defend hardest.

The Margra lamb rump comes off the charcoal grill with a méchoui spice rub, cucumber and ginger tzatziki, and caraway. Lamb fat is persistent, the rub is warm-spiced, and the caraway lingers. A delicate ginjo has nothing to say to any of that.

The Shirayuki Sake of Edo, Genroku Era does. The card calls it "Amber-hued, nutty and fig-toned sake reviving Edo-era richness and depth," and it is the only bottle on our list built on the register of dried fruit and nuts rather than flowers and melon. That is the same flavour family as the spice rub. It is also the only sake we would put against matbucha, which is stewed tomatoes and peppers finished with browned butter, kombu dashi and nori — browned butter is a nutty flavour and this bottle meets it head on.

If you have never had an amber, older-style sake, this is the bottle to try it on, and lamb is the right night to do it.

Where sake honestly loses

Chilli. We are not going to pretend otherwise.

Our Lebanese charcoal chicken carries green harissa, and the Brussel sprouts carry jalapenos. Capsaicin does not sit well with a careful ginjo: the heat blunts the aromatics you paid for and the sake does nothing to cool the heat down. You end up with an expensive glass of not-much.

Two better answers on the same card. The Hideyoshi Lachamte Sparkling Sake — "Bubbly peach and honeysuckle, playful and perfect with dessert" — has carbonation and a touch of sweetness, which is the actual shape that handles heat. Or skip sake entirely and have a cold beer, which is what most of the kitchen does.

That sparkling bottle’s own tasting note tells you where else it belongs, and we agree with it: dessert. Put it with the muhallebi, where the morello cherries meet the peach note halfway.

The fifth bottle is already in your dessert

The Sakari Matcha Junmai — "Junmai & matcha fusion. Earthy, creamy, bittersweet harmony, distinctly Japanese" — is the odd one out, because it is not really a mezze drink. It is an ingredient. It goes into our matcha-misu and into the Matcha Milk cocktail on the drinks card. You can drink it on its own, and we have written about doing exactly that, but the honest recommendation is to have it after the food rather than during it.

Two practical things

Temperature changes all of this. The Edo-style bottle in particular is a different drink warm than it is cold, and the snow-aged one is not. That is a longer conversation and it lives in how to drink sake; if the label vocabulary is what is stopping you, junmai, ginjo and daiginjo are explained here.

And a small honesty note about ordering: our wine and sake card prints no prices at all, so ask whoever is looking after you rather than guessing. If you are eating izakaya-style, which is to say everything at once and nothing in courses, tell them that too — it changes which bottle we would open first.

We serve pork and alcohol, so we are not halal; the FAQ covers the rest of the dietary questions. Everything quoted here came off the live card on 2 September 2026. The full list is on the wine and sake page, the food is on the menu, and the way to test any of it is to book a table.