How’s your relationship with booze?

We’ve had a long and troubling – as well as rewarding – relationship. I don’t know if you know much about Punjabi culture, but we’re quite hard-drinking. We’re military and farming folk and I have both in the family, and then you transpose that to the West of Scotland and it’s like alcohol squared. But I was never one of those people who came home at the end of the day and needed a drink.

Do you remember your first drink?

It was on Great Western Road, Glasgow – Number 605. It must have been 1974. My dad home-brewed some wine and we got a wee bit with the sugar still in it before it became wine, and I just thought that that was what wine tasted like. I remember that vividly, because we thought we were really drunk and just started behaving like the drunk people we’d seen on the telly. Later I got suspended from school at the age of 13 for buying everyone alcohol because I looked older than I was. My mum was deeply upset but my father just told me not to get caught next time.

You must have suffered some serious hangovers?

Luckily for me I’ve never had a hangover in my life, I can’t physically drink that much. I’m a big lad anyway and I’ll pass out before it comes to that stage. I never blacked out and could never use the excuse “oh, I was too drunk”, I always know what I’m doing. I still have the fried breakfast though.

You’re a Glasgow boy but opened a craft beer and curry restaurant in Edinburgh. Hows that? 

The culture shock for me was how incredibly vibrant the city of Edinburgh was and discovering the Leith area properly. It is hard for me to admit it as a Glasgow boy, but Edinburgh has the best food and probably drink scene. There’s much more of a social drinking culture.

Is Scottish drinking culture changing?

We are moving away from heavy manufacturing industry. We don’t build ships anymore; we don’t have that thirst to slake but still retain too much of the drinking culture around it. The thoughtlessness in drinking is the issue, this Pavlovian, ‘it’s Friday, I need a beer’ approach. But people are beginning to catch on to the notion of knowing the value and not just the price of things.

You’ve talked about the importance of food to building communities. Can drink play the same role?

Yes, when drink’s about more than simply getting hammered. With the democratisation of drink, if you have knowledge of wine, that supersedes anything else about your life. And, if you have an interest in wine, that opens doors that remained closed to you. Increasingly I’ve seen that closed world of the wine snob brick by brick being pulled down. Drinking’s such a universal experience that it can be a good thing. It relaxes us, makes us lose our inhibitions – even if it means we end up on a bank holiday weekend naked and chained to a lamp post next to a transsexual in Amsterdam (but that only happened once and he didn’t press charges!).

If you could drink anywhere in the world, where would it be?

It’s much more about the company for me, so in my kitchen with my girlfriend I’m the happiest man on the planet.

What makes for a top tipple?

For me every drink is about the history. If it doesn’t have a story to tell, I’m just not that interested. That’s what I like about whisky and craft beer. I like that people in the middle of rural Belgium, France, America or Somerset are making these beers. They don’t know how much money they’ll make, they don’t know how long it is going to last or who is going to buy it and yet they still brew beer.

If you were a drink, what would you be and why?

I’d probably be a Caipirinha – a bit citrusy and sweet, a bit of hard work to make but ultimately rewarding. And there’s always a bit of sugar left in the bottom of the glass.

As a condemned man, what would be your last drink?

Either a 16-year-old port or sherry cask Ardbeg or a bhang lassi. My dad once, in a drunken moment, admitted to having this marijuana drink. He never mentioned it again but both my brother and I heard him, so it must be true.

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