This Bar Is a Japanese Whisky Fan’s Dream
At Teruko, a Japanese restaurant in the basement of New York’s Hotel Chelsea, you could drink a different bottle of whisky every day for a year. Literally. Brian Evans, director of the hotel’s bars, estimates that Teruko is currently home to 365 bottles of whisky from Japan—the largest collection in all of North America. (Evans specifies that they are whiskies from Japan, not necessarily Japanese whiskies, because of new regulations on the classification.)
Japanese Whisky 101
“Everybody talks about the meticulous, ceremonious, detail-oriented nature in which Japanese whiskies are created,” says Evans. For him, there are a few pillars that define the category.
1. The artistry of blending. Japanese whiskies tend to combine old single malts with new, or lightly peated with heavily peated. Distillers try to find a “harmonious sphere of flavors,” says Evans.
2. Aging in Japanese wood. Trees that are indigenous to Japan, like sakura, mizunara oak and chestnut, are often used in the aging process.
3. Food compatibility. “There are certain umami flavor profiles that you see more in whiskies from Japan than anywhere else in the world,” he says. Inherently, that makes them a good pair for umami-rich dishes that are common in Japanese cuisine.
Amassing all of these bottles didn’t happen overnight. “We have a lot of the really well-known producers from, I’d say, the Mount Rushmore of Japanese whisky—Suntory, Nikka, Chichibu, Mars,” says Evans. But there are also rarer expressions from lesser-known or now-closed distilleries, which the Teruko team found through research and rabbit holes. “It became an obsessive snowball effect. One producer leads to another,” he says. “There are several single-cask expressions that some of these smaller, more artisanal producers are putting forth. They’re releasing only a few bottles a year, so you kind of have this Pokémon mindset. You’ve gotta catch ‘em all.”
One of the pleasures of drinking at Teruko is taking in the breadth of all these bottles, which sit on display against a pearlescent backdrop that was flown in from Tokyo’s now-shuttered Hotel Okura. “There’s something for everybody in this bar program,” says Evans. But sometimes, it’s hard to know where to start. We asked Evans to share five bottles that define Teruko—read on for four of his whisky highlights, and a cocktail-friendly shochu.