The Habibi-san Team

The Japanese highball is the correct drink for grilled food. We do not have one, because there is no whisky on any of our three menus. Here is why it works, and what we hand you instead.

Our beer list is three lines long, one brewery, two beers. Here is why a pilsner and a dark lager are the only two shapes a charcoal kitchen actually needs.

Sake with tahini, smoke, garlic and lamb fat. Working through our five bottles against the mezze board and the grill, including the one dish where sake is the wrong call.

Our wine list is nineteen bottles on a single page. Here is how we match it to a mezze table, working through the Italians, the French, the Spanish and the two outliers.

Temjanika is named after frankincense, and it is the bottle we hand to people who say they do not like white wine. What the grape is, why aromatic does not mean sweet, and the mezze it belongs with.

Vranec is North Macedonia's flagship red and it is on our list twice. What it tastes like, why tannin and char get on so well, how the two bottles differ, and what to order with it.

Six of the nineteen wines on our list are Macedonian - more than France, more than Italy. The six bottles as the list prints them, the producers behind them, and the reason a charcoal grill made the decision.

Chuhai is a contraction of "shochu highball". What is actually in the glass, the ratios, the lemon sour, how it differs from a whisky highball - and the honest note that we do not pour one.

Umeshu is one of the few drinks where the serve changes the drink more than the bottle does. The same liqueur can arrive as a thick, sweet, almost syrupy thing in a small glass, or as a long pale highball…

Let us get the awkward part out of the way first, because it shapes everything below. Umeshu appears exactly once across the whole of our Hamilton Road drinks offering. It is not a pour on our sake list. It is…