What to Drink With an Omakase

Ordering a drink at the start of an omakase is a strange little act of faith. You are choosing what to put in your glass before anyone has told you what is going on the plate.

That is not a complaint; it is the whole point of a chef’s-choice menu. It is also why most drinks advice about omakase is useless here. That advice assumes a fixed sequence — a lean white fish third, something fatty sixth, a bottle lined up for each. Our menu makes no such promise, and neither do we.

What our omakase actually says on the card

Three printed lines, and no more than that:

FEEEEED ME!
A.K.A. OMAKASE MIN. 2 GUESTS
"a series of dishes selected by the chefs, feel free to add on"

That is the entire specification. No course count, no dish list, no price, and no pairing column — because there is not a single price printed anywhere on our food menu, our wine and sake card or our cocktails and drinks card. If you want the format explained properly, we have already written it twice: the FEEEEED ME guide covers how ours works and what might land on your table, and our piece on omakase in Singapore covers the format in general. This post is only about the glass.

We do not run a pairing flight, and we are not going to pretend otherwise

A lot of restaurants would answer this by selling you a matched flight — five pours against five courses, priced as a set. We do not have one. Our wine card is a list of bottles with a grape line and a tasting note against each, and nothing else: no by-the-glass pairing menu, no sommelier programme, no printed suggestion of what goes with what. We said as much when we wrote about drinking wine with a mezze table, and it changes the question. It is not which bottle matches course four. It is which bottle is still working at course seven.

The rule: buy range, not precision

A single bottle across an unknown sequence has a job a matched pairing never has. It has to be drinkable next to a cold, sharp, dairy-heavy dip and still be drinkable forty minutes later next to something off the charcoal grill. Precision is worthless if you do not know what you are being precise about. Range is everything — which narrows our list in a direction that is honestly a bit unglamorous. The bottles that survive an unknown sequence are not the loud ones.

The white: Waimea Pinot Gris 2017

Our card describes it as "Lush, floral and weighty with stone fruit swagger." The word doing the work there is weighty. A thin, high-acid white is a lovely thing next to the first two plates and then falls over the moment anything comes off the fire. A pinot gris with some texture to it keeps up. It is the only New Zealand bottle on our list and it is the one we would put on a table of two people who have handed the menu to the kitchen and stopped asking questions.

The red: Cal y Canto Tinto

Tempranillo, merlot and syrah, and the card’s own note ends with the two words that decide it: "Juicy red fruit, soft spice, smooth and food-friendly." Food-friendly is the least romantic tasting note on our entire wine list and it is exactly the right recommendation for a menu you cannot see in advance. It has no hard edges to catch on anything. It will not fight the smoke and it will not vanish under it.

If you want the more interesting reds — and our list is unusual, because the largest country on it is North Macedonia — that is a different evening and we wrote it up in the Macedonian wine post. A big, inky vranec is a wonderful thing with a lamb rump. It is a less forgiving thing with a plate of labne.

The one that needs no thinking at all: beer

We pour Suntory The Premium Malt’s in three formats and nothing else in the beer section. It never once gets in the way of a course you did not order, and the full argument for it is in our post on why we pour it. For a table that does not want to think about drinks, this is the correct answer and there is no shame in it.

Cocktails are the one thing we would keep to the beginning rather than run through the meal. Ours are built as opening drinks, and the two we would start an omakase with — the smoky, brined Olive or Nothing and the green, low-sugar Levant — get a spotlight of their own.

The sake question

We keep five sakes, and only one of them is really an all-night bottle: the Ginrei Gassan Setchu Jyukusei Junmai Ginjo, which the card calls "Crisp, pure, snow aged sake with gentle aroma and quiet strength." Quiet strength is the useful phrase. It does not shout over the mezze and it does not disappear behind the grill.

The other four are more specific instruments, and one of them is a genuinely good closing move rather than an opening one. The Hideyoshi Lachamte Sparkling Sake carries the only serving format printed anywhere on the card — 280ML — and its printed note says outright that it is "Bubbly peach and honeysuckle, playful and perfect with dessert." That is the card telling you where in the meal to put it, which is rarer than it sounds. We walked through the whole five in our sake list post, and the dish-by-dish sake thinking lives in the sake and mezze piece.

One practical note that people get wrong: sake is not automatically a cold-and-delicate drink. The temperature range is enormous and it changes the pairing completely, which is its own post.

What is actually coming, roughly

We will not tell you the sequence, because the kitchen decides it. But the shape of our menu is not a secret, and it explains why range beats precision.

Early plates skew cold, sharp and dairy-adjacent — the labne, the matbucha, the hummus, the chickpea and roe things. Then the room changes temperature and the charcoal grill starts arriving. Our biggies list runs from an Atlantic seabass with yuzu beurre blanc and, in the menu’s own words, "bloody crispy skin", through a Mangalica pork collar chop with fennel spice, a wasabi and butter bean mash, charred vinegared radicchio and tonkotsu jus, to a Blackmore full blood wagyu karubi — 200g of short ribs, 600-day grain-fed, in a truffle ponzu jus.

Read those two lines next to each other and the problem is obvious. A wine that is right for the radicchio and the vinegar is not obviously right for 600-day-fed short rib. Neither is a wine that is right for the seabass. Something in the middle, with weight and no sharp corners, is right for all three, and that is the whole recommendation.

The dessert trap

Worth knowing before you order a nightcap: one of our desserts is already alcoholic. The muhallebi is a vanilla and yoghurt milk pudding with morello cherries in kirsch, yamasa soy caramel and a brown butter digestive biscuit — its own post is here. It is not a neutral base for a big spirit-forward drink. The sparkling sake is the better idea, and so is coffee.

The practical bits

The omakase needs a minimum of two guests, so it is not a solo-counter option. We are open Tuesday to Sunday from 5pm to 11pm at 29 Hamilton Road, and we serve brunch on Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 2.30pm. Our food menu adds a 10% service charge and no GST, in its own words: "Prices subjected to 10% service charge. No G.S.T. Woohoo!" Since the cards print no prices at all, we will not quote you one — what a dinner tends to come to is covered honestly in our post on what dinner at Habibi-san costs. And plainly, because Middle Eastern menus invite the question: we serve pork and alcohol, so we are not halal and never claim to be. The rest of the practical questions are in our FAQ.

The room is in the gallery, the bottles are on the wine and sake list, and the wider context — what an izakaya evening is meant to feel like — is in our izakaya guide.

Then hand the menu back, order the weighty white or the food-friendly red, and let the kitchen do the deciding. Book a table and tell us there are two of you who want to be fed.