All throughout May, WTOP is celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month with stories about the people and places shaping the D.C. region.
Cooking techniques and ingredients give Asian cuisines their distinct and regional flavors, and the same holds true for their alcoholic beverages.
At D.C.’s Moon Rabbit restaurant in Northwest D.C., the Asian-focused cocktail menu draws on ingredients and techniques specific to the regions of the continent.
With the botanical earth and spice in Asia, there’s a wide range of variety to make into different flavors,” said Thi Nguyen, the restaurant’s award-winning bar director. “The playing field is a little bit more open and more free for people to create their own gin.”
Moon Rabbit, which received a Michelin award for an exceptional cocktail program in 2024, carries Vietnamese, Indian and Korean gins, which feature fruits, such as longan, rambutan, jackfruit and dragon fruit.
One of the herbs Moon Rabbit uses in its cocktails is “culantro.”
“Almost like cilantro, but a little bit more spice into it … a very distinct spice note,” Nguyen said.
She said people often describe cilantro as soapy, but culantro is different.
It’s “minty and has a little kick into it,” Nguyen said, adding that culantro is long leaf with spiky edges, while cilantro has short leaves.
Moon Rabbit’s take on a gin gimlet was inspired by an Asian cucumber salad, featuring a mix of lime juice, ginger syrup and a cucumber-infused Indian gin. It’s shaken and garnished with a few drops of sesame oil that float on top.
“A very summer drink,” Nguyen said.
While at most bars, you tell the bartender what you’d like to drink, Nguyen said her customers tend to defer to the bartenders when it comes to what kind of libations to imbibe.
“They tend to do more like a bartender choice, where they just tell the bartender what they’re looking for and then the bartender would make it for them,” she said.
Experimenting with shōchū
A similar cultural norm exists in Japan. Honkaku Spirits founder Christopher Pellegrini is a Japan-based expert in shochu, Awamori and other koji spirits. Koji is a type of mold that is used in traditional Japanese fermentation that creates “umami-laden spirits with a character unique to Japan,” according to the importing company’s website.
Pellegrini said in Japan, you’re likely to have canned beverages or a single bottle of a spirit at home, but not much more than that.
“There’s not really a reason to have a big spirits cabinet in your home,” he said. “You’re not going to have dinner parties that you need to entertain in most cases. Most people meet out at a restaurant or a bar when they’re socializing.”
In terms of what people in Japan are drinking when they’re out, Pellegrini said shochu is a category unlike anything most American drinkers have tried. Shochu — not to be confused with soju from South Korea — is softer than most spirits in terms of alcohol volume, and it’s made in a variety of different ways.
It’s usually bottled at 25% ABV, Pellegrini said. Most Awamori, another Japanese spirit, is at 30%. It’s usually served with meals rather than being consumed as a standalone drink.
“They just never really do them in isolation. If there’s food on the table, then there may be drinks,” Pellegrini said. “If there are drinks, then there will also be food on the table.”
In Japan, shochu outsells sake, he said, and if you weren’t aware of that, you shouldn’t be surprised. Pellegrini said less than one-tenth of 1% of shochu production ever leaves Japan, compared with about two-thirds of mezcal and tequila production leaving Mexico.
But shochu and Awamori are showing up increasingly in cocktail bars in the U.S. Pellegrini predicted they will be “one of the next big things internationally.”
“They use a variety of different food stuffs to make sweet potato shochu, barley shochu, rice shochu, Kokuto sugar shochu and many other styles,” Pellegrini said. “There are 53 approved styles in Japan today. It is the most diverse spirits category in the world.”
Part of the appeal for bars, he said, is practical: Shochu carries no additives and is what Pellegrini called “the lowest calorie spirit in the world.”
What connects whiskey with DC’s famous cherry trees?
Japanese whiskey, a centuries-old tradition, has a connection to the nation’s capital.
Jokichi Takamine, a Japanese chemist, patented a process for producing a maltless whiskey in Illinois in the 1890s, Pellegrini said.
Takamine licensed the process to the Illinois Whiskey Trust, which planned to switch from malted grains to a Japanese fermentation style using kōji mold — the same mold used to make miso and soy sauce.
“He was nearly successful at changing American fermentation and American whiskey,” Pellegrini said.
Legal disputes and suspicious destruction of some of his equipment put an end to that, however. Takamine moved his family to Harlem, New York, where he later isolated medical adrenaline — epinephrine — the precursor to the EpiPen, Pellegrini said.
Takamine used his earnings from those patents toward philanthropic measures. He helped facilitate the donation of thousands of cherry trees on behalf of Japan to D.C. — the same ones you see today on the Tidal Basin.
This year’s National Cherry Blossom Festival, which marked America’s 250th anniversary, included a donation of 250 more cherry blossom saplings to D.C. — continuing a tradition that traces back to Takamine’s original 1912 gift, Pellegrini said. The Takamine Koji Whiskey brand was a sponsor of the festival this year.
Pellegrini said he and a colleague approached Takamine’s family in Japan and asked if they could revive the koji whiskey in his name and the family agreed.
“So much of the Japanese tradition of making whiskey, which is only 100 years old, is based on the Scotch tradition,” Pellegrini said. “This is made in Japan, but there’s no malted grains in it. It’s kojified grains. It’s barley that has had koji propagated onto it. It somehow runs a little sweeter.”
He described it as “a bridge between Japan and America, much like Dr. Takamine was back in his day.”
An 8-year-old koji whiskey, he said, “feels older when tasted — like it’s 15 years old.”
