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For non-drinkers, eating out can be a depressing experience. As friends deliberate over a heavy wine menu and the sommelier makes recommendations that promise an ambrosial marriage between food and drink, deciding whether to opt for still or sparkling water feels a touch boring.
But despite the soft drinks market growing 3.3% last year, and a bewildering array of smoothies, energy drinks and, most recently, coconut waters flooding supermarket shelves, few are food friendly. "There's this implicit idea when you go for a meal that there's nothing good that goes with food," says award-winning mixologist Tony Conigliaro, designer of the drinks menu at the recently opened Grain Store, who created a bespoke nonalcoholic range that offers the same food-matching flavours as wine. "Soft drinks and fruit juices are full of sugar," he says, "but you can have savoury flavours that actually complement what's going on in the food." Take his hay and grass water, designed to match a dish flavoured with smoked hay: "It's had a great reception, and people have opted out of drinking alcohol because they've got these options."
Alcohol consumption outside the home fell by 30% between 2006 and 2011, and as many as 15% of the UK population describe themselves as teetotal. For Jameel Lalani, founder of boutique tea company Lalani & Co, it's part of a wider trend towards towards lighter dining embodied by restaurants like Gauthier, which focuses on vegetables and puts calorie counts on the menu. "People are looking at food and health as one and the same, instead of being separate," Lalani says. "They're moving from having just alcohol all the time to half bottles, lighter styles of wine, and now away from wine to nonalcoholic offerings."
But pairing nonalcoholic drinks and food brings its own challenges. "Alcoholic drinks have a length, they have a structure and a texture," says Conigliaro. "Other drinks don't have that, even the ones supposedly designed for the nonalcoholic market." His response was to bring the same molecular techniques from cocktail making – his bar, 69 Colebrooke Row, boasts an in-house laboratory – to fashion nonalcoholic drinks that approach the complexity of wine: "By adding bitter notes, tannic notes, polyphenols, you can create these natural structures that stretch the flavour out. It's like you're trying to entertain the brain for longer."
HKK, the latest offering from the Hakkasan group, has also launched a nonalcoholic range, a decision born out of what head sommelier Serdar Balkaya sees as a responsibility to its customers: "We should provide options to anybody. To Hindus, if they don't eat beef, or non-pork dishes if they're Muslim. And we should provide drinks to people who don't drink alcohol as well." Like Grain Store, HKK's nonalcoholic Orchard drinks are made from fruit and vegetable blends, but restaurants like Gauthier Soho are also experimenting with teas. Lalani, who designed Gauthier's tea flight, argues that tea's 5,000-year history, and the impact of soils, altitude and ageing methods, give it a similar complexity to wine that's only starting to be explored for food pairings.
"The fundamentals are the same," he says. "You want to match intensity, strength, you either want to complement flavours or contrast. But beyond the rules – like how you'd have a particular wine with a particular dish – it's largely a blank state." Lalani's tea sommelier training programme, which they've been running for the past two years, has seen an upsurge in interest from sommeliers looking to expand their knowledge, and who are especially intrigued by how different brewing methods and temperatures impact on an individual tea's taste. "It's an extra skill for really ambitious sommeliers to take on, and adds another level to their role. There's more than just selection and storage."
But even if you have neither a tea sommelier nor a cocktail laboratory to hand, making drinks at home to complement food isn't tricky. "Say you're having a bolognese, you can make a basil water," says Conigliaro. "Two or three basil leaves, stir them into iced water, and you'll get that beautiful perfume. All you need to do is release some of the essential oils, and herbs are great for that because they've got a quick release." As with food, it's about experimenting. If you aren't going to reach for a ready meal, why settle for a Coke? "People need to be more adventurous," agrees Balkaya. "Try things. Get some orange peel, cinammon, cloves. Just boil them up into syrups, mix them up and see what happens."
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