When Your Dinner Check Comes With A Whisky Shopping List

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Picture this: you’re trying to decide between the Peking duck and dim sum when you notice you can also grab a RM500 bottle of whisky to go with your meal—or just to take home.

Welcome to dining in 2026, where your restaurant has become part liquor store.

This is the reality at premier dining chain Grand Imperial Restaurant, where a new partnership with Single & Available Malaysia has turned the corner table into something resembling a very upscale duty-free shop, starting with its Bangsar outlet.

The concept is straightforward enough to make you wonder why no one thought of it sooner: a dedicated whisky kiosk nestled inside the restaurant, where diners can browse over eighty premium spirits while waiting for their wontons to arrive. It’s retail therapy meets dim sum therapy, and frankly, it makes a certain kind of sense.

Joshua Wong, the executive director of Grand Imperial Group, puts it simply: “Fine food and great drinks go hand in hand.”

What he doesn’t mention is how this setup transforms the traditional restaurant experience into something closer to a treasure hunt.

You might arrive planning to order the usual suspects—maybe some har gow, definitely the roast duck—but leave with a bottle of Springbank 18 that caught your eye between courses.

The whisky selection reads like an enthusiast’s dream list. There’s the Arran 10 Year Old, made with barley grown practically next door to the distillery—a rarity these days.

The Springbank 18 offers “maritime and mineralic notes,” the kind of tasting note that makes perfect sense after you’ve tried it and sounds like pretentious nonsense before.

Then there’s the Glenfarclas 25, fresh off winning “World Best Speyside Whisky” in 2026, with notes of “old leather, tobacco, and oak”—basically a gentleman’s club in liquid form.

What’s clever is the honest pricing: instead of inflated restaurant markups, you pay regular retail prices.

The selection extends beyond Scotch to premium Chinese baijius like Kweichow Moutai and WuLiangYe—spirits that command the same reverence (and eye-watering prices) in China that aged whisky does in the West.

It’s the kind of transparent approach that makes dropping serious money on bottles feel slightly less painful.

Shareen Yew, founder of Single & Available, describes it as “removing barriers” by bringing retail into a trusted dining spot with fair pricing and convenience—a refreshingly straightforward way to say they’re making good whisky easier to buy, even if it’s still expensive.

The timing works perfectly for this hybrid concept; we’ve watched bookstores serve wine and coffee shops sell records, so a restaurant with a whisky shop feels like the natural next step.

There’s something charmingly old-school about the whole thing, harking back to when dinner out was an event where you’d spend the entire evening in one place.

In our grab-and-go world, the idea of lingering long enough to browse spirits while waiting for your dim sum feels almost luxurious.

Whether other restaurants will copy this idea is anyone’s guess.

For now, it’s a different way to spend an evening: you can eat, shop, drink and let someone else clean up the mess.

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