Kanpai: Why Drinks Come First at an Izakaya

Four glasses land on the table. Somebody’s hand moves towards one — and in a Tokyo izakaya, that hand stops.

Not because of a rule anyone will recite at you. Because the drinks arriving is not the start of the drinking; it is the start of the waiting. Everyone gets served, everyone lifts, somebody says kanpai, and only then does anyone taste anything. It is the most visible piece of Japanese drinking culture and the one most likely to catch out a first-timer, because the mistake it invites — drinking early — feels like no mistake at all.

This is a post about that ritual specifically. If you want the mechanics of why a drink tends to be the first thing ordered at an izakaya at all, our post on otoshi handles that: a small dish lands the moment you sit down, and it needs something to sit beside. Here we are interested in the toast itself.

What the word actually says

Kanpai is written 乾杯. The first character, 乾 (kan), is “dry”. The second, 杯 (pai), is a cup. So the word says, roughly, dry the cup — SAKETIMES translates it as “drink your cup dry”, the Tokyo language school Coto Academy as “dry cup” or “bottoms up”.

Nobody means it. Both sources say the same thing on this point, and it is worth stating plainly because the literal reading has caused more than one visitor to down a full beer at speed: the instruction is ceremonial. You take a sip. You drink at your own pace afterwards. The word is a starting gun, not a dare.

On where the word came from, our two sources do not agree, so here are both rather than a blend. SAKETIMES notes that kanpai came into Japanese from Chinese, which is why the same term turns up as gan bei in Mandarin, gom bui in Cantonese and geonbae in Korean — a shared toast across four languages. Coto Academy instead dates the Japanese use of the word to a specific moment: the signing of a friendship treaty between Britain and Japan in 1854, late in the Edo period, involving the Earl of Elgin and Inoue Kiyonao. Those two accounts can both be partly right — a borrowed word, popularised at a particular table — but we have not found a source that reconciles them, so we are not going to pretend one exists.

The rule underneath the ritual

Strip the ceremony away and one instruction is left: do not drink before the toast. Coto Academy puts it as bluntly as that. SAKETIMES describes the fuller version at a formal occasion — nobody drinks until everyone is seated, the first round is poured (usually beer), everyone stands, someone gives a short speech that ends in “Kanpai!”, and only then does the room start eating and drinking.

What is being enforced is not politeness for its own sake. It is that the table begins together. One person a minute ahead of everyone else is not a crime; it just means the group has started four separate evenings instead of one.

Why the first round is usually the same drink

There is a phrase for the opening order: toriaezu nama. Toriaezu is “for now” or “to start with”; nama is draft beer. “For now, a draft.” Someone says it, the table agrees, and four identical glasses arrive at once.

Which is the practical half of the ritual. A toast needs everybody holding something at the same time, and the fastest way to get four filled glasses to a table simultaneously is for all four to be the same easy thing. The convention is not really about beer. It is about arrival time.

Once the toast is done, the constraint lifts and people order what they actually want — which at ours is where the sake, the highballs and the cocktail card come in.

Pouring: the part that surprises people most

The second convention is that you do not pour your own drink. SAKETIMES is careful about the scope of this — “pouring one’s own drink tends to be frowned upon in Japan in all but the most casual of settings” — so it is a formality that relaxes among close friends, not an iron law. But at a work dinner, or with anyone senior, it holds.

The practical shape of it:

• You pour for other people, not for yourself. The polite move is to watch your neighbour’s glass rather than your own, and to top them up before they have to ask. Coto Academy: it is polite to pour for your neighbour, “especially seniors or coworkers”.
• Two hands on the bottle. Either both hands, or one hand pouring with the other supporting the wrist or elbow. One hand alone reads as careless.
• Lift your glass to receive. When someone pours for you, raise the glass off the table rather than leaving it sitting there — again, two hands if you are being formal about it.
• To decline, cover the glass. SAKETIMES gives the gesture: hold your hand palm-down over the cup or glass. It refuses the pour without refusing the person, which is the entire point of it.
• Height signals rank. When the glasses meet, the most senior person’s is held highest and everyone else’s a little lower. Coto Academy notes the boss holds theirs highest; you lower yours slightly for anyone above you.

If your glass is empty and nobody has noticed, you are not condemned to thirst. Both sources say the same: ask someone to top you up, or in a casual room, get on with it.

What we do about any of this at Hamilton Road

Nothing, is the honest answer. We are a Japanese-Middle Eastern place in Jalan Besar, not a Tokyo izakaya, and nobody on our floor is going to correct how you hold a glass. Fun dining, not fine dining is a real position and this is one of the places it shows: we are not in the business of importing rules and then policing them.

But one part of it is worth taking anyway, and it is the waiting.

Our kitchen sends food out in waves as it is cooked, not in courses, and a lot of it comes off a charcoal grill that takes as long as it takes — the Lebanese charcoal chicken is printed on our menu with the subline (45MINS OF LOVING), and that is not a joke about the wait. A table that starts together eats together through all of that. A table where two people began ten minutes early spends the evening slightly out of step, and it is a small thing that is surprisingly hard to fix once it has happened.

So: order a round first, all of it at once, and wait the ninety seconds it takes to arrive. Then start. That is the whole of what kanpai culture is worth borrowing, and it costs nothing.

If you want to say the word while you are at it, nobody will mind. It is not ours and we would not claim it — but it is a good word, and it has been doing this particular job across at least four languages for a very long time.

Booking, hours and the one dietary line

We are at 29 Hamilton Road, Singapore 209198, in Jalan Besar. Tuesday to Sunday, 5pm to 11pm, with brunch on Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 2.30pm. Closed Mondays. Book on Chope or through our reservations page.

Habibi-san is not halal. We serve pork and we have a full bar — the FAQ covers the rest of the practical questions. For the wider picture, our guide to izakaya dining in Singapore is the place to start, the history of the format explains where the room came from, the sake FAQ answers the questions that come after the first glass, and the gallery will show you the room the toast happens in.

Sources

Kanpai’s meaning, the no-drinking-before-the-toast rule, the pouring conventions and the glass-height convention: Coto Academy, “What Is Kanpai?” and SAKETIMES, “A toast to Kanpai!”. Both were read on 5 September 2026.