Sakura at Sake no Hana.

As you already know from previous posts (here, here, and here), I'm a pretty huge fan of Sake no Hana. It's right opposite my club so really handy to just park and walk across the road, and they do really delicious Japanese food in a relaxed and informal atmosphere, thus it's a great place to go with friends.

Last week Dan and I went along to try the Sake no Hana bar's limited edition Sakura bar. Sakura is the celebration of spring and the Japanese cherry blossom season, and Sake no Hana have taken inspiration from the ancient Japanese custom of enjoying the passing beauty of the 'Sakura' cherry blossom by feasting on sake and sushi under the trees, and turned their bar into a beautiful cherry blossom garden! 

We started with the beautiful Violet Risshun cocktail, which was the most fun cocktail I've ever had the pleasure of experiencing, and one of the tastiest, too! If you look at the photo at the top of this post it shows three different glasses, and the cocktail is basically three-in-one. The carafe contains Jinzu Gin, green chartreuse, grapefruit and lemon juice, shiso syrup and Burlesque bitters, while the jug contains Belsazar rose vermouth, maraschino cherry, cranberry and lemon juice.

The idea is to have a small glass of each, and then you combine the two to create another cocktail - tada! Three in one! Both were delicious individually, and I actually think I preferred them individually rather than mixed together. All of them tasted really sweet which I loved as I'm not a huge fan of bitter cocktails.

While we were tasting our cocktails the spinach with cassava and white miso soup arrived. This soup is my favourite soup of all time, Sake no Hana serve it with almost every set and special menu they do, and I love it.

After the miso soup we moved on to the 'picnic box', which consisted of various sashimi and sushi. I love the idea of having a picnic box under the cherry blossom trees, and the gentle, floral scent of Floris Cherry Blossom really brought to life the faux cherry blossoms that surrounded us (my hair kept catching in them, much to our amusement). The sashimi was just perfection, and the sushi was also the usual high standard you get at Sake no Hana. It was quite hard to photograph through the box in a confined space though!

Last but not least was the dessert, a Sakura Cotton Cheesecake. As you all know I'm a dessert girl, but this dessert was something else. The cheesecake tasted more cakey than a normal cheesecake, but it was delicious - incredibly light, it melted in the mouth and the fresh cherries, cream cheese and cherry sorbet it came with were the perfect accompaniments. 

After our dessert two cherry blossom macarons arrived. These were tasty, however they were slightly undercooked and a little too soft and chewy. A very small flaw in an otherwise perfect meal.


The bar was really breathtaking, and I didn't realize the flowers were faux until the very end when I touched one! It was designed by renowned florist Veevers Carter to capture the essence and ethos of the Japanese cherry blossom season, aka Sakura, and it really makes the bar come alive in such a magical way. 

We really loved Sake no Hana's Sakura experience, the food was just enough to fill us up but not leave us feeling bloated and heavy, and the cherry blossom bar was just stunning. As always the staff were really helpful with the menu and asked if we had any allergies before the food was presented to us.

Press Photo