Cocktail Spotlight: Olive or Nothing and Levant

Our cocktails and drinks card has eight signature drinks on it. This post is about the first two, which are also the two that explain the whole list: one is a whisky drink with no whisky in it, and the other is a mojito with dairy in it.

Everything quoted below is read off the printed card. There are no prices on it — not on the cocktails, not on the wine and sake list, not on the food menu — so there are none here either.

Olive or Nothing

Build, as printed: bourbon, olive, brine, soda

Description, as printed: "A refreshing and umami reinterpretation of the highball. Rich bourbon served with smoked olives for that final umami hit."

Flavour tags, as printed: UMAMI · REFRESHING · SMOKINESS · STRENGTH

Three things about that entry are worth pulling apart.

It is the only bourbon on the card, and there is no whisky at all

Bourbon appears on our menus in exactly one place: this drink. And whisky — the thing a highball is normally made of — appears in zero places across all three of our documents. We have written about this twice now, because it keeps being load-bearing: the shochu highball post and the Japanese highball post both walk through what we do and do not pour.

So Olive or Nothing is not a highball substitute we improvised. It is the card being honest: it says reinterpretation, not version. The long, cold, soda-lengthened shape is borrowed. The spirit is different on purpose.

The word "highball" appears on our menu once, and this is where

Inside this description. Not as a heading, not as a product, not as something you can order by that name. If you searched our entire drinks card for the word, you would find it here and nowhere else. That is a small thing and we mention it because it is exactly the sort of detail that gets misreported when someone summarises a menu from memory.

The olives are a real dish, not a garnish idea

The brine and the smoked olives are not decoration borrowed for the glass. Our mezze list carries an item whose actual printed name is "Some Special Kind of Olives" — wood smoked olives, herb, lemon evoo — and we gave it a whole post, because smoking small things properly is harder than smoking large ones.

That is what makes the umami tag defensible rather than marketing. Smoke and brine are two of the most reliable savoury levers there are, and this drink uses both of them at once, next to a room full of food off the charcoal grill. It is the most on-brand drink we make, and if you only try one, try this one.

Levant

Build, as printed: cucumber, mint, whey, lime, rum, soda

Description, as printed: "A zesty twist on the classic mojito. Fresh cucumber and vibrant mint meet bright lime, a whisper of whey, and a delicate fizz for lively depth,"

Flavour tags, as printed: REFRESHING · CITRUSY · BOTANICAL · STRENGTH

Yes, that description ends with a comma. We checked whether that was our reading rather than the menu’s doing, and it is the menu’s: every other cocktail description on the card closes with a full stop, and this one closes with a comma. It joins a small collection of typographical facts we have owned up to rather than quietly corrected — our sprouts are printed "Brussel" with one L in the sprouts post, our spanakopita is printed with "fuille de brik" in its own, and our lamb rump is printed with "picked cucumber" in the lamb one. Menus are printed objects made by people. We would rather quote ours accurately than tidy it up and quietly become a source that disagrees with the card in your hand.

The whey is the whole point

Cucumber, mint, lime, rum and soda is a mojito with the sugar dialled down. Whey is the ingredient that makes it ours.

Whey is what is left when you strain yoghurt. It is faintly sour, faintly savoury, slightly saline, and almost nothing in a drinks programme behaves like it — it lends body and a low sour note without the sharpness of more citrus or the weight of cream. In a drink that is otherwise all green and cold, it is the thing that stops it reading as a cordial.

Our kitchen does make its own strained yoghurt: the labne on our mezze list is printed as housemade strained yoghurt, with smoked shimeji, taklia, garlic crisps and peppermint, and we wrote it up in the labne post. Straining yoghurt produces whey as a by-product, and a kitchen that runs on minimal wastage is the kind of kitchen where a by-product ends up in a glass. We are not going to claim on this page which batch went where, because that is a service-floor fact and not one printed anywhere — but the connection is right there on the menu, and it is the most Habibi-san thing on the cocktail list.

"Levant" is doing a job too

The name is the geography. A mojito is Caribbean; cucumber, mint and soured dairy are Levantine mainstays. The drink is a small version of the argument the whole restaurant is making, which we set out at length in our post on how the two cuisines actually fit.

A note on those flavour tags

Each cocktail on our card carries four tags, and each tag is drawn with a dot on a small scale bar. We are printing the tag names and deliberately not converting the dot positions into numbers. Saying a drink is "7 out of 10 for smokiness" would be inventing a precision the card does not claim, and inventing precision is the fastest way to become unreliable about everything else.

What the tags are genuinely useful for is ordering by shape rather than by ingredient. Both drinks here carry REFRESHING and both carry STRENGTH. They split on the other two: Olive or Nothing goes UMAMI and SMOKINESS, Levant goes CITRUSY and BOTANICAL. That is a real fork. One of them is built to sit beside charred meat; the other is built to sit beside the cold end of the mezze table.

How we would actually order these

Levant first, Olive or Nothing second. The green, cold, low-sugar one belongs at the start of the meal with the dips and the pita, and the smoky brined one belongs once the grill has started arriving. If you are eating in the other direction, swap them. If you have handed the menu to the kitchen entirely, both of these are opening drinks rather than all-night ones, and what to drink through an omakase is a different question with a different answer.

If neither is your shape, the rest of the card runs through Ume & Bitter, Matcha Milk, L.S.M., S.S.S., Aomori Amazeballs and our espresso martini — we covered where the umeshu in Ume & Bitter comes from and how to order it in the umeshu ordering post. And if you would rather have no menu at all, our Haji Lane sibling works differently: at Li’l Habibi the drinks come from Bar Stories, which does not hand you a list, and we told that story in the no-menu cocktails post. It is worth a separate evening — here is where to find it.

All of this fits inside a house rule we have said out loud before: fun dining, not fine dining. The drinks are made properly and served without ceremony. Nobody is going to describe the dot positions to you at the table.

Plainly, as always: we serve pork and alcohol, so we are not halal — that and the other common questions are in our FAQ.

The full card is on the cocktails and drinks page, the room is in the gallery, and we are at 29 Hamilton Road from 5pm to 11pm, Tuesday to Sunday. Book a table, order the Levant, and see whether you can find the whey. For the wider context of what an evening here is meant to be, our izakaya guide is the place to start.