Britain: the capital of cocktails

A new generation of bartenders are shaking up the scene with innovative recipes and molecular mixology
Tony Conigliaro
Tony Conigliaro’s molecular approach to cocktails now has a global fanclub. Photograph: Felix Clay

With his dark suit, single white glove and air of twinkly indulgence Agostino Perrone, the head barman at London's Connaught Bar, looks every part the magician. He is mixing a martini, the gin cascading at arm's length over ice, a chilled glass at the ready.

It's a ritual that has been performed at this hotel thousands of times since the drink became fashionable in London in the early 1930s. For much of the 20th century if you wanted a classic cocktail in the capital, you came to luxury joints such as the Connaught or the Savoy. In the real world cocktail bars had steadily been degraded by an explosion in ultra-sweet and garish drinks that signified almost the exact opposite of their original sophistication. By 1981, when the Human League's Susan Sulley sang that she was "working as a waitress in a cocktail bar" everyone understood that she was on the bottom rung of the social ladder until poor, ill-used Phil Oakey came along to rescue her.

Now, for the first time in decades, London's bartenders have a spring in their step. At this summer's Spirited Awards at Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans, the industry's most prestigious competition, the capital's bars and their staff grabbed nearly all of the international prizes.

Perrone's revamped Connaught Bar was named the world's best bar, but other nominees were 69 Colebrooke Row in Islington and Nightjar and Callooh Callay in Shoreditch. Meanwhile, other London bars the Artesian(Best Hotel Bar, and Best International Bartender for Alex Kratena), Zetter Town House (Best New Cocktail Bar)and Salvatore's at The Playboy (Best Drinks Selection)won their categories outright, while Whistling Shop and Happiness Forgets were also nominated.

"People say that the 1920s and 1930s were the golden age of cocktails," says Perrone, "but that was the era of prohibition in the United States. Those weren't positive times. We're living through the golden age now."

A lot of the credit for this golden age, at least in London, goes to Tony Conigliaro. His bar, 69 Colebrooke Row, looks, with its black and white check floor and white-jacketed bar-staff, like an Italian barbers from the 1950s. Round the corner he has a laboratory that has helped to introduce a new scientific rigour to the business of making drinks. The fruit in the rhubarb gimlet there, for example, has been put through a centrifuge to reduce it to a beautiful cordial, something like the platonic essence of rhubarb. He sees drinks, almost literally, as building blocks.

"I visualise drinks as 3D objects to work out how they'll go together," he explains. "and I quite often draw them when I'm working on a cocktail. To me different spirits have different shapes ... gin looks like a sphere but with all these bits coming out, like a kind of Rubik's Cube."

This approach, dubbed "molecular mixology", much to his displeasure, has devotees around the world. Even the traditionalist Connaught allows Perrone to add his own special "botanicals", flavours such as cardamom and ginger to his martini and he offers a deconstructed Bloody Mary topped with a celery foam.

But science is not the only reason for London's newfound success. Nightjar owner Edmund Weil points out that the capital's multicultural appeal means bars can attract expert bartenders from all over the world.

Meanwhile, Callooh Callay's Andrea Montague thinks it is London's drinking public that has changed. "People are not scared of alcohol any more," she says. "They used to want tall, fruity drinks for the effect. Now they're asking for a martini, two to one, with gin and an olive."

Many of those people will be visiting the city from Monday for London Cocktail Week, when up to 15,000 punters will descend on its bars for seminars and to try new flavours. Organiser Hannah Sharman-Cox says that she wants cocktails to become "as popular as cooking". This is optimistic but, if anything from the Depression has to return, a well mixed Martini certainly wouldn't be at the bottom of my list.