Millay, formerly known as Fig & Thistle Market, started carrying more sake during the pandemic.

Modern drinking has made a mincemeat of the old ways. Everything’s a mash-up, a melange, a deconstruction of hierarchies in search of discovery. This is how we arrive at the Mission District natural wine discotheque and the Temescal Sherry shot, and other assorted, ever-blurry boundaries of Bay Area bar culture in 2022.

Such is the scene you’ll find inside Millay, a pandemic-pivot bottle shop and bar from proprietor Angel Davis. In an earlier drinking epoch, Millay might have fallen into a neatly defined category, happy to operate as a simple wine shop. But here, Davis has embraced the modern moment for multi-hyphenate beverage businesses by offering a place where small-production, minimal-intervention wine shares equal footing with a beverage stepping into a bigger American moment: Japanese craft sake.

Inside this earth-toned, softly lit space just off Duboce Triangle, any semblance of a drinker’s barricade between the worlds of wine and sake has been irrevocably breached. Davis’ vision is to create a shared context between the small-maker vigneron of the minimal-intervention wine world and the artisan toji of Japan — sake brewers working within the 1,000-year-old tradition.

“All of this is about going back to small-production beverages, and people making something because they really care,” says Davis. “People will taste these kinds of sakes for the first time and say, ‘Wow — what just happened?’”

Many of the sakes at Millay defy conventional expectations. They can be earthy or sweet, mushroom funk’d or chocolate bitter, wildly complex, heady even, and miles away from the extended exercise in soft subtlety to which most sake drinkers are accustomed. Nothing here is served warm. If weird drinking is the new normal, these small-batch sakes offer a ready complement to the psychotropic universe being explored by the extra-experimental winemakers, hazy craft beer heads and herb-obsessive vermouth freaks.

Millay started out as a wine shop, and now showcases unusual sakes alongside natural wines.

It’s a sort of light-switch moment that people talk about often in fields like craft beer, specialty coffee and wine. Yet even among drinking enthusiasts, sake remains relatively underappreciated — sales are up and expected to continue growing in the coming years, but sake’s market share in America remains behind wine, beer, cocktails and zero-proof drinks, and it is on just 3% of restaurant menus nationwide.

That’s now starting to change. Japanese exports of sake have grown at 10% year over year for the last 15 years, and for those in the American sake trade, breaking into wine lists and pairing menus at high-end dining experiences has long represented a holy grail for the category’s growth, showing up at luxe destinations like the French Laundry or Nashville’s the Catbird Seat.

You can see it in the evangelism of hybrid shops like Millay, as well as at the wonderfully modern approaches to sake found at Charles Namba and Courtney Kaplan’s Tsubaki and Ototo restaurants in Los Angeles; George Padilla’s work at Rule of Thirds and Bin Bin Sake in Brooklyn; and the integrated role sake plays in the wider drinking psychedelia at Oakland’s Daytrip. In their capacities to meet drinkers where they’re at — with no prix fixe required — and their embrace of unconventional drink styles, spaces like these are on the very forefront of sake’s fresh contextualization, and nowhere else does this impact feel more fresh and immediate than at Millay.

It’s fitting that this genre-defying shop should be in San Francisco, a city that has long been a hub for the culinary appreciation of sake, and not just at revered Japanese restaurants like Village Sake, Rintaro and Kaiseki Saryo Hachi. Since 2002, True Sake in Hayes Valley has pioneered sake sales in San Francisco and is widely regarded as among the very best sake retailers in America; meanwhile out in the Bayview, Sequoia Sake is part of a vanguard of American sake breweries.

“I just want sake to be an everyday thing for people,” says Millay owner Angel Davis.

For Davis, cultivating sake’s role in the conversation has become a mission. She was first exposed to the possibilities of sake at Fig & Thistle, the influential Hayes Valley wine bar/cannabis dispensary hybrid, which she co-founded in 2012. “A friend of mine who used to work at True Sake turned me on to it,” she remembers. Before long, sake started showing up on the shelves at F&T, and sneaking into wine club pickups.

“Then the pandemic happened, and I really didn’t know sake as well as I would have liked,” Davis recalls. “I started learning more and something just clicked for me, came over me. … I fell for sake so hard. I felt like I didn’t have a choice. I had to do more with it.”

The space Millay occupies was originally a second Fig & Thistle location, but the environment inside has been entirely reimagined. Against a backdrop of pastel pink neon cursive displaying the shop’s logo, Davis sells 150 bottles of small-production natural wine alongside 50 bottles (and counting) of sake. “My goal is for it to be equal,” Davis says. “I want to sell as much sake as I do wine.”

On the shelves, in the same little space as the cartoon foxes and drunken gnomes that make up much of natural wine’s visual iconography, one can find a little pocket wonderland of sake flasks, 1-cup jars, elegant Junmai Daiginjos and endlessly complex Tokubetsus. In this context sake argues for itself beautifully, complementing the artistic language of the modern wine bottle with vivid aesthetics and evocative language.

Nahbee Jong and Jonathan Grossman taste a flight of sake at Millay.

The conceptual overlap between sake and natural wine offers a sort of “X marks the spot” bull’s-eye in the form of namasake, a rare sake subcategory with a growing profile in the United States. Sparingly produced and unpasteurized, bottles of nama emerge just a few times a year, and must be kept refrigerated throughout their journey across Japan and beyond. Once something of a regional, seasonal delicacy in Japan, namasake has become a subject of great interest among a small but growing group of flavor-chasers worldwide. This is thanks to the wild, evocative flavors and textures these sakes are capable of: mushroom bombs, dark chocolate raspberries, creams, violets and florals, and unctuous, heady, cheese-like tones that profoundly upend any preconceived notion of sake as a game of refinement and subtlety.

Though the production process of making sake differs wildly from that of wine, for curious and adventurous drinkers, placing a bottle of Amabuki Ichigo Namasake next to bottles of Duckman Pet Nat or orange-hued Hungarian Kiralyleanyka makes a kind of intrinsic sense. There’s something thoroughly modern about considering sake this way alongside natural wine, a post-genre kaleidoscope of flavors and resonances, all of it crafted by tiny artisan producers creating giant evocative flavors.

Millay owner Angel Davis, who also owns Fig & Thistle wine bar in Hayes Valley, prepares a flight of sake for Jonathan Grossman and Nahbee Jong.

You’ve had sake before but not like this, in a room like this, unmoored from cultural or culinary orthodoxy, afforded the room to breathe and play and to stand on its own merits as a drinking leitmotif ready for its close-up, embraced by open-minded drinkers primed for the moment.

“Light attracts light,” Davis says. “The curiosity and openness of the people who come in here is amazing, and adventurous drinkers are open to trying these sakes they may have never heard of.”

Indie importers like Floating World and Sake Suki help keep the good, rare stuff flowing through Millay’s doors, and behind the shop’s small bar a daily menu is available, featuring both wine and sake by the glass. I try a pour of the Amabuki Ichigo Junmai Ginjo, an experimental sake made using strawberry flower yeast, and it is a little jewel box of flavors: soft and creamy at first, growing into something like a fruited attack that’s reminiscent of a good sour lambic beer.

“That’s a big thing for us too, converting the beer people,” laughs Davis. “Once they find out sake is brewed, it’s like a whole world opens up to them. The process is just fascinating.”

As pandemic restrictions and social norms soften, Millay will host a series of events, focused on both wine and sake, and also tea — by day this is a tea bar, featuring teas from buzzy new Japanese tea purveyor Tea With Tekuno. A sign out front of Millay implores passersby to “Join The Wine / Sake Club” and there it is again, that blurring, the co-mingling of two very old beverage traditions remixed into something new and modern.

“I just want sake to be an everyday thing for people,” Davis says. There is perhaps a touch of proselytizing in her voice, the genuine kind, when you know you’re onto something big and you want to share it with the world.

Millay. Open noon to 7 p.m. Monday-Wednesday; noon to 9 p.m. Thursday-Saturday; noon to 6 p.m. Sunday. 691 14th St., San Francisco. 256-651-9903 or millaysf.com .

Jordan Michelman is an author and James Beard Award-winning journalist. Instagram: @suitcasewine Email: food@sfchronicle.com