Resy Spotlight: Boston’s Koji Club Is Here to Shine a Light on the Delights of Sake

By Anna Lee Iijima

For most Americans, sake — and by extension, the sake bar — is enveloped in a certain mystique.

America’s trailblazing sake establishments — sanctuaries like Decibel in New York’s East Village, or its more polished midtown counterpart, Sakagura — introduced generations of Americans to the distinctiveness of sake, but also codified the American sake experience as something otherworldly and clandestine.

The prototypical sake bar was imagined as a hideaway — metaphorically and sometimes literally, too. A sake bar, after all, wasn’t a place you’d just stumble into solo. Usually, you had to know someone — someone who would lead you down a dark, unmarked staircase, perhaps, and guide you through the menu. After all, for most Americans, sake is something ordered blindly, stabs in the darkness of words like yamahai, daiginjo, or shiboritate nama genshu.

After 15 years in the sake business, including more than a dozen operating and developing restaurants like O-Ya, Hojoko, and others for the Cushman Concepts restaurant group, Alyssa Mikiko DiPasquale had spent a lot of time in sake bars across the country and in Japan. She’s spent much of her career navigating this sense of enigma.

In 2020, when DiPasquale quit her job to develop Koji Club, her own sake bar, “every commercial real estate agent I talked to was like, ‘I’ve got the perfect basement for you.’” But DiPasquale had something totally different in mind. “I wanted to open a bar that shined light on sake,” she says, “as much light as humanly possible”…