Highballs to Skyballs with Ginza's finest
I was in Ginza 6-chome, quite possibly the worldâs poshest and priciest drinking district, where bartenders make drinks the way Patek Phillipe makes watches (with rare precision and whopping price tags).
Shouldnât a top-flight Tokyo bartender be shaking stainless steel, if not 24-karat gold?
Not always, says Ito. Ice melts slower and chips less in a plastic shaker.
âCrushed ice disappears in a steel shaker,â he says. Thatâs why most bartenders donât shake it. But Ito has his Tupperware.
Superb for summer
He shook crushed ice with Singleton Irish whiskey, Drambuie and wedges of orange complete with their rind. He calls it a Heather Honey Blossom.
My style isnât cool at all, but I think it produces a better drink.âDaisuke Ito
I canât tell you whether itâs from shaking the ice, or the use of fruit wedges rather than juice (itâs probably the two together), but the orange was unusually bracing and aromatic. A superb summer drink.
Ito told me of his experience at a bartending competition in Hong Kong where he overheard other contestants describing his style of shake as âboring.â
âThey were all twirling the shaker around their heads, which looked really cool,â he says. âMy style isnât cool at all, but I think it produces a better drink.â
Trade secrets
Itâs no surprise that Ito favors craftsmanship over showmanship. When he arrived in Tokyo from his native Sendai, he began frequenting Star Bar Ginza, home to Hisashi Kishi, a titan of Japanese bartending famed for his technical expertise.
Ito eventually persuaded the master bartender to hire him, and so began a nine-year apprenticeship.
As Ito explains it, a Star Bar apprenticeship involves a lesson in shaking, a lesson in stirring, and the rest comes through observation and plenty of practice at home.
âIn nine years I probably made the equivalent of three daysâ worth of drinks for customers, but I could try the leftovers of Mr. Kishiâs cocktails from the shaker, so I could learn how they should taste,â he says.
When Kishi opened the offshoot Land Bar last year, he handed Ito the keys and the chance to show off what heâd been practicing for nearly a decade.
Skyballing it
One of Itoâs specialties is the Skyball. In the late 1960s, Smirnoff created and hyped the Skyball, hoping to build on their brand-making first big hit -- the Moscow Mule.
They picked a simple recipe (vodka, tonic, lime according to the advertisements; vodka, tonic, lemon according to the recipes engraved on the base of Smirnoff Skyball mugs) and gave it a name that capitalized on the big theme of the era: space travel.
The fact that youâve never heard of a Skyball tells you how well the campaign fared. But Ito is reviving the drink and has sourced the original mugs (think Moscow Mule mugs but far lighter, made from an aluminum copper alloy.)
âIt has to be served in these mugs. It wouldnât taste right in a glass,â says Ito.
That seemed an implausible claim, so I ordered two Skyballs, one in a glass, one in a mug. The latter was considerably more refreshing.
My guess is that the mouth of the highball glass was too narrow, the glass wasnât as cold on the lips, and there was less room for ice.
The difference was so stark that I asked Ito why he wouldnât serve highballs in this kind of mug.
âI tried it,â he says. âIt wasnât right. Whisky has a more delicate aroma than lemon. If it gets too cold, that aroma disappears.â
Mug's choice
I ordered two highballs, Taketsuru and soda, one in each receptacle. He was right again. The highball in the mug had no fragrance and the metal seemed to spoil the whiskyâs flavor.
I tried a highball in a mug without ice. It was better, but still more muted than the one in the glass.
If your idea of bartending is Tom Cruise spinning on his heels as he free-pours three bottles at a time, you might not understand Land Bar.
But if you want to meet a man who considers the conductive properties of a cocktail shaker, researches the optimum receptacle for each drink and makes world-class cocktails in Tupperware, Daisuke Ito is your man.
