New Bar, New Drinks: Katana Kitten's Garden-Fresh Cocktails

To borrow from the famous book title, the shiso grows in Brooklyn.

Katana Kitten is a newly-opened bar which aims to transplant Tokyo's famed cocktail culture into New York's West Village. The new project is spearheaded by industry veterans Masahiro Urushido (formerly of Saxon + Parole), Greg Boehm (founder of Cocktail Kingdom, co-owner of Mace) and James Tune (Boilermaker co-owner).

One of the bar's star drinks is an update on the classic gin and tonic, featuring Ford's Gin, lime cordial and tonic. With the exception of the gin, everything is made or sourced locally. For the tonic, a quinine solution is added to very cold, extra fizzy soda water dispensed via a state-of-the-art Suntory highball machine. The drink also features a house-made lime cordial. The cocktail is garnished with a large shiso leaf, which Katana Kitten's head bartender Masahiro Urushido grows himself in a community garden in Brooklyn.

It's the shiso leaf that illustrates the bar's deceptively simple concept. "We try not to buy things. Otherwise you can have that drink somewhere else," Urushido  says.

Urushido's small garden plot hosts roses, basil, sage and lavender. But the biggest garden stars are two shiso plants (one red and one green) that vie for the majority of real estate in the five feet by seven feet plot. "The red is a little more saltier. The green one is much more minty," he explains. (The red shiso is used in his Amaretto Sour update.)

The plants, now full of sprightly fluffy leaves and standing about three feet high, began as two small cuttings from Urushido's grandmother's garden, in Nagano, Japan. "My grandma handed them to me, 'Oh you're forgetting something,'" Urushido says. "I put them in a wet napkin, and I planted them. The second year, all the seeds spread and all these plants started coming up. This is the fourth year."

"It grows strong, like mint," he says, as he gently plucks off leaves the size of his palm. "I just leave it there and it grows. With the store-bought shiso, everything is a uniform size. These can keep growing."

The garden is organic, left to thrive on its own under the Brooklyn elements. (To protect the privacy of his neighbors, Urushido asked that the precise location of the garden not be disclosed.)

Every other day, Urushido stops in before heading into the bar, and picks about two handfuls of leaves, which he packs in a Ziploc bag. While the green shiso leaves appear in the gin and tonic (and in the burger), the red leaves are combined with a Japanese ume plum shrub, which is then used in the Amaretto Sour. Even with an every other day pruning, Urushido is confident there's enough leaves to keep servicing his drinks.

That said, he's looking ahead to the winter, when everything but the roses wilts. "In wintertime, everything dies," he says, surveying his lavender and wormwood plants. During the cold months, Katana Kitten will use a store-bought shiso. "The shiso gin and tonic is not going to come off the menu as long as the bar's there," Urushido promises.

In a way, that's what will mark the drink as special, he reasons, because the summer versions will taste slightly different. "In the summertime, the flavors will pop more."

The Japanese plants, now thriving in a Brooklyn garden, are a stand-in for the bar's East meets West ethos. Japanese influences are layered across the debut drinks menu, which includes a spritz with yuzu and umeshu, a Vesper Martini variation with a hinoki tincture, and a swizzle with Calpico and sake. 

The bar, incidentally, is named after the famed samurai sword which represents an almost spiritual devotion to craftsmanship. But then there's the addition of "kitten," which brings everything down a notch.

"It's about how seriously we take what we do, but we don't want to be serious all the time," Urushido says. "There's a playfulness that comes in when it comes to serving guests."

The downstairs bar, for example, is modeled after the cluttered themed bars in Tokyo's famed Golden Gai district. If the current room looks a bit spare, that's intentional. "We'll get there someday," Urushido says. "We're trying to make everything organic."