Some mEats episodes ease their way in. A coffee. A handshake. A bit of polite small talk before the first plate lands. This one didn’t start with coffee. It started with Jason Momoa and a glass of vodka.
We met Khal Drogo himself at Fenix in St John’s — the city’s glossy Greek fantasy space, all white stone, firelight and drama. He clocked it immediately, properly impressed, saying it felt like landing in Greece.
The vodka in question was Meili — Jason’s own spirit — and crucially, this wasn’t a ‘celebrity pops by with a branded bottle’ situation. Jason drinks it. He’s deadly serious about it. He talks about it like someone who’s been building up to this for years. Which, as it turns out, he has.
His reasoning is simple but obsessive: vodka is mostly water, and water matters. If the water’s good, the spirit’s good. If it’s bad, no amount of branding can save it. He compared it to why pasta tastes better in Italy, Guinness hits different in Ireland, and pizza just works in New York. Place matters. Inputs matter. Water matters.
At this point it’s hard not to clock the obvious — yes, Aquaman jokes are low-hanging fruit — but the water thing isn’t a gimmick for him. Long before he was playing a king of the sea, Jason was a surfer, a marine biology student, and someone who’s been openly banging the drum about oceans, plastic, and sustainability for years. Aquaman didn’t create that obsession; it just gave it a megaphone.
Which is why Meili doesn’t feel like a side hustle. It feels like another expression of the same worldview: do things properly, respect the source, don’t churn out pointless rubbish.
Within minutes, the lunch found its rhythm. Jason’s preferred combo — a beer, a shot, a little water on the side — was christened the ‘kolohe’ (Hawaiian for ‘rascal’, which feels about right).
It turned out to be a wildly wide-ranging chat. The troubling colonial origins of the so-called ‘Hawaiian’ pizza, how Hawaiian food mirrors that of Arabic and Greek traditions, his love of Eric Cantona and Manchester United, Heavy Metal music (he played with his band ÖOF TATATÁ at Louis), sucking at acting for ‘many years’, caviar and how he doesn’t want ‘peaches on his arugula’.
Fair play.
