Dry January has a habit of exposing a familiar design problem. While sober culture continues to grow, non-alcoholic menus and brands often lag behind, stripped back to the point of personality loss or turned up to the point where they look like gimmicks.
Burma Burma Restaurant, the award-winning Indian restaurant group known for spotlighting Burmese cuisine, has taken a different route, with the help of Mumbai-based studio Naughty Naughty. The new spirit-free cocktail menu embraces chaos and cultural depth, proving that zero-proof need not mean zero character.
The menu arrives as a zine-like cocktail book inspired by punk rebellion, Burmese street culture and the visual language of travel journals. It features eight spirit-free cocktails, each built around herbs and spices that evoke flavours traditionally associated with alcohol, without any spirits. The menu was always meant to feel more like a cultural artefact than a drinks list.
There’s also a bigger context at play here. Globally, the shift towards non-alcoholic beverages has accelerated, driven by health, mental wellbeing and – if we’re being honest – a growing aversion to hangovers. Yet alcohol is still culturally tied to fun, freedom and indulgence.
“Who doesn’t love alcohol at the end of the day?” as the project brief half-jokingly puts it. Quite a lot of people, it turns out. Burma Burma’s response was not to sanitise the experience, but to ask how sober people express themselves when loudness is taken off the table.
Rushil Bhatnagar, creative director at Naughty Naughty, reveals how those questions became central to the creative approach, saying: “Rebellious and sober are such polar opposites, we wanted to play with that idea.’ The studio drew parallels with Burma itself, a country often perceived as peaceful and reserved, yet shaped by ongoing protests, music movements and acts of resistance. It’s a place where expression is layered rather than explosive.
Research led the team towards punk zines, particularly their role as raw, unfiltered communication tools during moments of political and cultural tension. From the 1970s onwards, zines offered an outlet for dissent, emotion and freedom in otherwise rigid systems – a sensibility that has been translated into the hand-assembled menu. Collaged imagery, cutouts and unpolished layouts replace the usual polished bar menu aesthetic.
Alongside flavour descriptions and spice guides, the pages include anti-alcohol posters, call-outs for individual cocktails, a dice-based drinking game delivered by servers, and behind-the-scenes glimpses into how each drink was developed. Each spread doubles as a loose guide to Burmese streets, inviting a sense of wandering rather than instruction.
Cultural authenticity was non-negotiable, and so all imagery comes from real travels by Burma Burma’s kitchen, chef and bar teams, some dating back to 2021 and 2022. The studio immersed itself in Burmese scripts, drawing on Thai street typography.
“We made sure all cutouts and collages would feel personal, like a travel journal zine rather than an editorial, clean look,” says Rushil. In his words, it was a way of “completing the loop”.
Visually, the palette draws on Burmese textiles, longyis, dolls, stamps, and street signage. Neon tones sit alongside deep purples, dirty greens and bright reds. Typography mixes display fonts inspired by shop signs, newspapers and stamps, while photography remains deliberately handheld, sometimes shot on phones, reinforcing the sense of immediacy. Editing choices reference ’80s and ’90s zines, with bursts of colour offset by black-and-white moments.
Structurally, the menu balances chaos with usability. The audience spans from 28 to 65, so legibility was carefully protected where it mattered most. Ingredients and non-alcoholic markers remain clear, even as the pages buzz with visual noise. The cover, by contrast, is intentionally restrained. Sturdy hardbound boards wrapped in printed canvas feature stamp-like illustrations of spices and ingredients, keeping the rebellion inside.
There is always a risk of sober culture becoming overly earnest, but Burma Burma’s spirit-free cocktail menu feels refreshingly mischievous. The difference is that it treats non-alcoholic drinking as an opportunity for creativity, culture and a little bit of rule-breaking rather than an absence.
