Last month, I surprised myself by polishing off a six-course lunch consisting entirely of desserts. As anyone who knows me can attest, I was born without a sweet tooth. However, when Naotaka Ohashi, owner of the contemporary French restaurant Tirpse, told me that he had started offering dessert-focused tasting menus paired with five kinds of sake, I was intrigued. The idea that a meal could be based entirely on confection is wild, but the decision to serve sake with each sweet dish is incredibly bold.
"We wanted to try something completely new at lunchtime," Ohashi says, explaining that the dessert tasting menu — available only during lunch service — would run until summer 2016. An avid sake fan, he thought that experimenting with unorthodox pairings would be a way to "have fun and learn more about sake at the same time." Ohashi visited small producers around the country to seek out unusual brews that work with sweets.
The menu changes seasonally and showcases the talent of pastry chef Kiriko Nakamura. This autumn, the meal opened with a shot of fresh cucumber juice accented with sudachi (a lime-like Japanese citrus) and ginger gelee followed by a dish of yogurt panna cotta and Kyoho grape sorbet, which was topped with sliced Asian pear and three kinds of grapes, and drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. The sake it was paired with was Aramasa Lapis 2014, a slightly fizzy junmai daiginjo from Akita Prefecture. The panna cotta course demonstrated Nakamura's knack for counterpoint: The tartness of the vinegar and the astringency of the fruity olive oil cut the creaminess of the pudding and balanced the sweetness of the sorbet. The fruity character of the sake, which was tinged with softly bitter notes from Miyama Nishiki rice it was made with, underscored the flavor of the Kyoho grapes, rounding out the course nicely.