Wagamama Ginger Kombucha

Wagamama ginger kombucha costs £5.00 and carries 43 kcal, the grown up glass of the soft list: fermented tea, sharp and lightly fizzy, ginger warming it through, at a modest 8 g of sugar. Published price, the soft list's most expensive and its most interesting.

Kombucha is tea fermented by a culture until it turns sour, alive and faintly effervescent, and the acidity is the point: it plays the role wine plays against food, cutting richness and resetting the palate, which no sweet soda on the list attempts. The ginger warms what the ferment sharpens.

The trace alcohol of fermentation stays below the soft drink line, so it belongs to every table including the driver's. It partners the rich savoury end of the menu best, katsu, tantanmen, the pork belly ramen, where its sourness does the cutting work, and it is the drink this site recommends to anyone who misses wine at the table. Vegan and gluten free marked.