Nick Bumgardner
When Jess Benefield and her husband, Trey Burnette, the culinary duo behind Two Ten Jack in East Nashville (and Chattanooga), began thinking about their next new thing, they knew it was time for a trip to Japan.
Joining them on this fact-finding and inculcation mission was their beverage director, Kynsey Hunter. The three all laugh and look wistful when talking about the trip three years ago when they immersed themselves in the culture, food, and drink of their adopted culinary home.
One key part of the trip was learning all they could about the history and production of sake, Japan’s national beverage. Hunter is the first to admit that before working at Two Ten Jack, she knew very little about the drink that most folks, sadly, think of only in small hourglass bottles warming on a hibachi table, capped with a ceramic thimble.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” says Hunter, laughing, but cautiously appreciative in the way a craft brewer might allow consumption of a Miller High Life on a hot summer day.
Nick Bumgardner
Today, Hunter and colleagues support one of the best sake lists in town in their lush homage to Japanese culinary arts, The Green Pheasant. Their first hurdle was getting importers to bring new product in, but they’ve had success expanding what’s now available in Middle Tennessee.
“First, we wanted to arrange the list to make sake less intimidating and more approachable,” says Hunter, who is on her way to becoming a full-fledged Kikisake-shi, or sake sommelier.
Nick Bumgardner
She says it was confusing for her at the beginning, given the complexity of Japanese names that delineate the grades of sake. Instead of a traditional list organized by grades only, Hunter put them in size categories first, then by grade within, giving people an idea how many servings each bottle delivers and how they might want to sample different sakes with their friends.
The waitstaff can then explain the nuances of flavor, temperature, and style, and how best to pair the drinks when ordering dishes. The warm sakes that still dominate other places in town, for the record, are heated to hide inferior qualities and product past it freshness date.
Nick Bumgardner
Most high qualities are consumed chilled or at room temperature to allow the drinker full access to breadth of textures, creaminess, crispness, and earthy tones that the different products celebrate.
With sake on tap, in addition to close to 45 brands lined up at any given time, there’s an archipelago, if not a world, of sake styles out there to try.
215 1st Ave S, 615-205-5400; thegreenpheasant.com
SAKE 101
- Don’t call it rice wine. It’s not. It’s closer to beer in that it’s brewed and made from grain, but the similarities stop there. Sake is its own wonderful thing.
- Sake is made from three ingredients: water, rice, and koji, a mold-inoculated rice that helps fermentation.
- Sake is made through multiple, parallel fermentations, traditionally in the winter, allowing for a longer process.
- The grades from low to high are: Daiginjo, Ginjo, Tokubetsu, Honjozo
- The grades are named after how much of the special sake rice is polished down to its starch core. The more removed, the smaller the grain and the more you need to make sake, making it more expensive, but not always better. It’s a matter of taste.
- If the word Junmai appears with the grade, it means the sake is not fortified with additional alcohol.
- Speaking of alcohol, sake falls into the 14 to 18% range, like wine—but don’t call it wine.
- Nigori is coarse-filtered, allowing some sediment and extra flavors to pass through.
- Sake comes in large 750ml bottles as well as small, single-serving ball-shaped “cups” that are whimsically decorated with cartoon creatures.
- Ask the server for the proper temperature for the sake. Sometimes it will be a range, from cool to warm (not hot) and you should experiment to find your own preference.