The Owners of Ogawa Are Opening “Almanac,” an All-New Japanese Bar Located Just Upstairs
It has been less than one year since the husband and wife duo Vy (“Vee”) To and Victor Ng along with business partner Albert Zheng opened the doors to Ogawa Sushi & Kappo located at 310 Market Street. What started as an expansion of their Washington D.C location is now having its own internal expansion.
On Friday, November 15th, the trio will open the doors to an all-new Japanese bar dubbed Almanac, which will be located upstairs from Ogawa.
The menu will feature reimagined American classics with Japanese twists, which is also how the beverage menu was conceptualized. For both food and drink, Almanac will be utilizing hyper-seasonal ingredients within its intimate second-floor space. The cocktail program is led by Danny Childs (Slow Drinks), who won the 2024 James Beard Foundation award for Beverage Book with Recipes for Slow Drinks: A Guide to Foraging and Fermenting Seasonal Sodas, Botanical Cocktails, Homemade Wines, and More. Childs, who trained as an anthropologist and ethnobotanist studying traditional plant use, now applies his knowledge of beverages to create botanical bar programs with a sense of place.
The menu will include such dishes as karaage octopus, miso-glazed chicken wings, wasabi fries, chicken and tofu sandwiches, a wagyu hot dog, and more. Prices will range from $7-$18 per item. There will be five seats at the bar available for walk-ins, and a long banquette with several tables and 15 total seats available via OpenTable, with reservations being strongly encouraged. Almanac will be open Thursdays through Saturdays from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. Ogawa remains open Wednesdays through Sundays, with two 23-course omakase seatings per night at 5:30 and 8 p.m.
“We wanted to build an intimate space where people can enjoy great food, beautifully crafted drinks, and a great time,” said Vy, who opened Ogawa with Ng last December. “We have been open in Philadelphia for almost a year, and we are finally ready to execute this upstairs concept that we’ve been planning since we decided to bring Ogawa to Philadelphia.
“Almanac is a tale of two places coming together: America and Japan,” said Rob Scott, Almanac’s Head Bartender. “Wedrew a lot of inspiration from Japanese-style bars and their focus, precision, and attention to detail, as well as adopting the use of ingredients that we don’t often see in America. The idea is that we are taking Japanese flavors and concepts and filtering them through the American palate and lens, and vice-versa.”
Childs’s cocktail menu will feature seasonally-styled classics such as Old Fashioned, Manhattan, Martini, Sour, Daisy, Flip, and Highball, and a number of original creations. Each style of cocktail will be highlighting 1-2 flavors, botanicals, fruits, or vegetables at their peak or preserved at their peak. Once a drink is formulated, it will only remain on the menu while the ingredient is available and at its pinnacle of flavor. Once the ingredient is no longer available, the drink comes off the menu and will be replaced by something that is very much of the moment. Scott says the idea is to give the menu a very “attuned-with-nature feeling.”
“The bar at Almanac will be the city’s first true Slow Drinks beverage program with an emphasis on Japanese flavors and cocktail culture,” said Childs. “The program will focus on hyperlocal and hyper-seasonal ingredients that are able to tell the story of both the mid-Atlantic U.S. and Japan. We will emphasize a zero-waste approach to utilizing unique foraged and locally-farmed ingredients and transform them through age-old preservation techniques such as fermentation, infusion, pickling, shrub-making, sugar preserves, etc. While I’m so excited to share this first-of-its-kind program with the city, none of it would be possible without the team we’ve assembled to bring this project to life. Rob Scott, who worked under me at Farm and Fisherman during the entirety of my final year there, is the head bartender, and I can’t think of a better person for this job. He is one of the most personable, intelligent, and technically oriented beverage professionals I’ve had the pleasure of working with. And having Vy and Victor Ng as the facilitators of this project has been an absolute joy. They’ve spared no expense in allowing us to outfit this space with the tools and equipment that a program of this caliber deserves. I can’t wait to showcase what we’ve been working so hard on.”
While Childs did put together the cocktail menu, and will be regularly consulting on the menu as it seasonally changes, he will not be working inside the restaurant on a day-to-day basis.
There will be a “Bartender’s Choice” omakase cocktail option, where the bartender asks several questions in order to create personalized drinks for the guests. And there will be a two-tiered pricing system, with one price for your standard bartender’s choices, and a second as a “reserve” option, featuring rarer, more premium spirits.
There will also be two different types of Japanese beer available, along with a limited section of wines by the glass and several non-alcoholic cocktail options such as brewed ginger beer, kombucha, amazake (rice-based N/A drink), as well as tea, and eventually Kyoto-style cold brewed coffee. In addition, there will be off-menu mocktails, with an omakase options similar to the beverage omakase with the same questions and guidelines.
