Category Izakaya Culture

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…

Most bottles in a restaurant do one job. You pour them, people drink them, that is the end of the relationship. One bottle at Habibi-san does three, and it turns up on three different menus to do them: on the…

There are five sakes at Habibi-san. Not fifty, not a bound folder with a ribbon in it — five bottles, printed on one red card that sits under the cocktail menu on your table. We are a Japanese-Middle Eastern charcoal…

The whole classification comes down to two questions: was distilled alcohol added, and how much rice was polished away. Answer those and a sake label stops being a wall of vocabulary.

Sake is the rare drink you can serve near-freezing or hotter than tea, and it becomes a different thing at each end. Temperature, vessels, pouring, and what to drink alongside food cooked over charcoal.

Same family tree, different drinks. Honkaku shochu is single-distilled from one declared ingredient; most green-bottle soju is sweetened neutral spirit. Here is what separates them, and what we pour.