Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
in tokyo, the highball reigns supreme
LIKE nearly every bar in Tokyo, Star Bar, a subterranean cocktail spot in a nondescript building in the commercial district of Ginza, features a highball on the menu.
Unlike other bars in Tokyo, it calls its version a “Ninja Ice Highball”. That’s because the handcut ice block, a narrow rectangle with precise edges, is frozen in a manner that renders it clear to the point of being barely visible, making it appear as if the bubbles of carbonation are bouncing off a phantom object. It’s served in a Collins glass with an ever-so-thin lip.
Later, at TwentyEight, a handsome bar at the posh Conrad Tokyo that looks out onto the city from the 28th floor, I ordered the highball. Peter Mizutani, who goes by the title “bar captain”, brought a tray of items and arranged them on the table before me: a tall glass filled with dense ice cubes, a bottle of Yamazaki whisky, a bottle of soda water and a small glass dish of shredded lemon rind. He poured the whisky, then soda, slowly.
The highball is a riddle of a drink. It’s a simple mix of whisky, soda water and ice, but its combinations are infinite. Ice shape and density, glassware, the water’s carbonation intensity and minerality, the kind of whisky, the proportions, preparation process and presentation all matter. There is no room for error. Simplicity is the drink’s magnificence and its vulnerability.
And, like Coco Chanel’s little black dress or Thelonious Monk’s
’Round Midnight, it’s the attribute that makes the highball so eternal.
Hurried is the modus operandi at Marugin, an izakaya – Japan’s answer to the pub – in Shinbashi, a business district just south of Ginza. The bar is not especially notable. On a Wednesday night, it bustled with “salary men”, local jargon for men in suits who go to bars late at night, straight from work.
To accommodate the packed room, highballs are served from a machine. It was designed by Suntory, the Japanese whisky company, and this bar is where, in 2008, the first one was installed.
Highballs are served on rotation to the packed crowd in weighty mugs said to have been designed for working men’s hands. A depression for the thumb at the top of the handle ensures an easy grip.
The highball, which has its roots firmly planted in America, is a broad category that includes the Tom Collins and even the gin and tonic. But in the 1950s, to ramp up Japanese whisky’s visibility in a nation then dominated by beer, Suntory introduced the idea of serving it with water in keeping with the Japanese preference for loweralcohol drinks.
Nobody ever actually stopped drinking highballs in the following decades, but with the company’s 2008 introduction of the gizmo that pours whisky and soda together from a familiar, draft-beer-like tap, the trend took off again. So much so that in 2018 Suntory introduced the machines on these shores, a year after it launched Toki, a whisky intended for American highballs.
Throughout a week I spent in Tokyo, it became clear that the highball is every drink for everybody.
Mastery is on display at Orchard Bar, another Ginza spot. Drinks are served in eye-catching vessels: a mini disco ball, a small metal watering can, a cocktail glass with a pencillength stem.
Sumire and Takuo Miyanohara, the husband-and-wife owners hold court. Sumire pointed out an artfully-arranged platter of fruit. That was the menu. Choose one, and they’ll custom-design a cocktail. An enticing proposition, but first, would they make me a highball? Of course.
But the Stradivarius of highballs is the one we witnessed at Apollo Bar. Hidenori Komatsu has always been the sole bartender here. He plays only Tom Waits. He has precision-engineered his method for making highballs. It starts with him flicking a switch to turn on a spotlight, transforming the bar into a stage. With that, the choreography begins: a hand-chiselled, coffin-shaped ice block goes into a crystal glass so thin that it yields to pressure. He dramatically flaps a bamboo fan over the ice to liquefy the surface and prevent microfractures on contact with the room-temperature liquids. When ice cracks, bubbles find their way in and carbonation diminishes, Komatsu-San explained. Carbonation is the delivery system for whisky’s flavours. Temperature is crucial, too, he said. Colder liquid holds carbonation better.
There’s an ancient Japanese philosophy called wabi-sabi, best translated as the beauty of imperfection. The pursuit of perfection is innate to artists and craftspeople here, but to reach it, the philosophy goes, is dangerous and an offence to the gods. Not to attempt it, though, is also an offence. But in that moment, drinking from a razor-thin-lipped glass as minuscule bubbles carried whisky flavours and Waits sang his raspy yet ethereal dirges, perfection seemed tangible. | The Washington Post.
The making of this cocktail is as complex as performance art – a riddle of a drink though a simple mix of whisky, soda water and ice LIZA WEISSTUCH