by Alia Akkam
500 g (1 lb 2 oz) sugar
bunch of fresh rosemary
METHOD
For the Rosemary Syrup, combine the water and sugar in a saucepan and heat until the sugar dissolves. Add the rosemary and bring to a boil, then pour the mixture into a sterilised glass jar and let cool.
To make the cocktail, combine the saffron gin, lemon juice, rosemary syrup and egg white in a cocktail shaker and dry shake. Add ice to the shaker, then shake again. Strain into a coupe glass and top up with Champagne. Garnish with a rosemary sprig.
Hidden away from the hubbub of Piccadilly, the first thing one notices upon entering The Stafford London is how desirably quiet it is. Built in the 17th century as private residences fit for a lord, The Stafford London opened in 1912. Abundant in Victorian flourishes and complete with carriage-house accommodations where guests sleep in onetime stables overlooking a cobbled courtyard, it feels less like a hotel than a noble mansion. During World War II, The Stafford London was a stomping ground for homesick American and Canadian officers, while its labyrinthine wine cellars – a 1600s relic –served as an air raid shelter.
At The American Bar, where bar manager Benoit Provost – a fixture since 1993 – is the debonair host, autographed photos and a mish-mash of baseball caps, flags and model aeroplanes dangling from the ceiling allude to a colourful past. Nancy Wake, an Allies spy, frequented the bar and now there’s a zingy cocktail in her honour called the ‘White Mouse’, the moniker given to the stealthy Wake by the Germans. Despite the inviting element of kitsch, The American Bar is a class act – a union of marble and mahogany that calls to mind a decidedly private St James’s club.
No. 16
Mulata Daisy
CONNAUGHT BAR AT THE CONNAUGHT, LONDON, UK
Created by Ago Perrone
INGREDIENTS
40 ml (1⅓ fl oz) Bacardi Superior rum
20 ml (⅔ fl oz) freshly squeezed lime juice
1 teaspoon caster (superfine) sugar
½ teaspoon fennel seeds
20 ml (⅔ fl oz) dark crème de cacao liqueur
10 ml (⅓ fl oz) Galliano
cacao powder, to decorate the glass
METHOD
Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker filled with ice and shake. Decorate the rim of a coupe glass by dipping it into the cacao powder. Double strain the cocktail into the decorated glass.
It’s hard to resist anything served in a room designed by the late David Collins and Connaught Bar is no exception. Consider the trolley, from which a bespoke Tanqueray No 10 Martini is prepared tableside, as it roves against a background of original oak panelling enlivened by textured silver leaf and overlaid with pastel linen panels that channel Cubism. The ‘Faraway Collins’, a global-inspired take on the go-to quencher Tom Collins (Star of Bombay gin, sarsaparilla soda water, fresh yuzu juice, homemade eucalyptus-infused simple syrup), is equally exquisite.
The bar opened in 2008 with Ago Perrone at the helm and, mirroring its balanced interior design, it doesn’t shy away from the experimental, nor does it break away from the past. How could it, when The Connaught, which opened in 1897, has such a splendid one, just like its sister properties The Berkeley and Claridge’s. This Mayfair institution, at which Charles de Gaulle often lodged, telegraphs a hushed country estate; its carpeted staircase with glossy wood bannisters a highlight. Scope out the massive art collection – peppered with pieces by greats such as Louise Bourgeois and Julian Opie.
SPOTLIGHT:
SIGNIFICANT ARCHITECTURE
a rich architecture and design heritage only heightens a bar’s ambience. Visit these hotels for a memorable backdrop.
GOOD BONES
Four Seasons Hotel Gresham Palace Budapest, Hungary: A 1906 Art Nouveau masterpiece, originally built for the Gresham Life Assurance Company by Zsigmond Quittner and József Vágó, it retains gobs of Secessionist-style features, including Zsolnay ceramic tiles, Miksa Róth-made stained glass, wrought-iron railings and peacock gates. Admire them all before drinking a ‘Smoky Forest’ (mezcal, blood orange, pine) at KOLLÁZS.
The Merchant Hotel, Belfast, Northern Ireland: The old sandstone Ulster Bank building in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter is a Victorian stunner, done up in the Italianate style, with sculptures carved into its façade. Today, it’s home to the Merchant Hotel, and it’s blessed with intact friezes and Corinthian columns. In the Cocktail Bar, where classics such as the Bramble and Grasshopper get much-deserved play, an antique fireplace and Baccarat chandeliers remind visitors of the room’s 19th-century roots.
Hotel Metropole, Brussels, Belgium: Walk through the Hotel Metropole’s French Renaissance main entrance and into the column- and pillar-lined Empire-style reception hall, and the stained-glass windows and mahogany will usher you back into the 1890s. That’s when French architect Alban Chambon completed the hotel, best known for Café Metropole. Here, patrons take in the Art Nouveau decor from one of the tables while drinking an easy-to-make Black Russian with vodka and coffee liqueur. Gustave Tops, one-time bartender at the hotel, is attributed with inventing the drink in 1949, in honour of the US ambassador to Luxembourg.
Delano South Beach, Miami, US: Philippe Starck’s good-humoured chess set in the garden is what most Delano guests remember. But the zany designer’s imprint is found throughout the hotel, including the oversized pink sofa in the lobby and the Victorian pool table balanced on curved, chunky legs. Ian Schrager opened the Delano in 1995, determined to invigorate a then seamy stretch of South Beach. Schrager might no longer be involved, but after one ‘Piquant Paloma’ (Don Julio tequila blanco, Ancho Reyes, grapefruit juice, agave nectar) at the pink-tinted Rose Bar, it’s clear that the champion hotelier’s eyebrow-raising move was yet another stylish victory.
The Dewberry Charleston, South Carolina, US: As you drink your ‘Dark as Night’ (Pierre Ferrand Ambre Cognac, Barolo Chinato, Austrian walnut liqueur) in the Living Room at the Dewberry Charleston, you’ll expect a cigarette case to tumble out of a suit pocket and onto the ground at any given moment. The Living Room, with its books, cherry wood and radiant brass bar, truly feels tugged out of a mid-century film script – a nod to the hotel’s days as the L. Mendel Rivers Federal Building (erected in 1964).
Hilton Sydney, Australia: Downstairs at the Hilton Sydney, Marble Bar is an upbeat venue that fills with locals who want to kick back with live music and an ‘Autumn in New York’ (tequila, apple liqueur, apple, agave, citrus). If they pay careful attention, though, they’ll realise that they are also in one of the city’s most breath-taking rooms. A sea of marble and cedar, it is crowned with a plastered ceiling, which – following the dismantling of the original 1893 Italian Renaissance-style bar of the same name – was refurbished and carefully re-assembled here, piece by piece, in 1968.
No. 17
La Violetera
1912 MUSEO BAR AT THE WEST IN PALACE, MADRID, SPAIN
INGREDIENTS
50 ml (1¾ fl oz) Belvedere vodka
30 ml (1 fl oz) Monin violet syrup (crème de violette will create a silkier texture)
20 ml (⅔ fl oz) grapefruit juice (pink grapefruit juice is a lovely alternative)
15 ml (½ fl oz) Monin blueberry syrup (the bar uses 20 ml/⅔ fl oz, but it tastes brighter with less)
fresh mint leaves, to garnish
METHOD
Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker filled with ice and shake. Strain into an old fashioned glass filled with crushed ice and garnish with mint leaves.
Ernest Hemingway was an avid fan of the Prado, arguably one of the world’s most notable museums, so when he was in Madrid he liked to stay just across the street from it at the Palace Hotel. Inevitably, he would follow up those art excursions with dry Martinis downed at the Palace Bar, which makes a cameo in his 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises. Pablo Picasso and poets such as Federico García Lorca, who comprised the prominent Generation of ’27 group, relished the watering hole as well.
Now The Westin Palace, the h
otel opened in 1912 on once-palatial grounds at the behest of King Alfonso XIII, who craved a splashy modern property for the city. Its compelling history – during the Spanish Civil War, for example, it doubled as a makeshift hospital – can best be appreciated from the 1912 Museo Bar (as the Palace Bar was renamed), sipping on an effervescent ‘Ginger Collins’. Wood-panelled and dotted with sage-green armchairs, it is akin to a library, with numerous artefacts to peruse. Silver glasses used by the king to toast the hotel’s opening and a letter adorned with Salvador Dalí’s scribbles all help piece together the hotel’s rich cultural heritage.
No. 18
Calorosa
LE BAR AMÉRICAIN AT HÔTEL DE PARIS MONTE-CARLO, MONACO
Created by Ghisolfi Lorenzo
INGREDIENTS
1 chilli seed
50 ml (1¾ fl oz) Aperol
25 ml (¾ fl oz) Bombay gin
25 ml (¾ fl oz) limoncello
25 ml (¾ fl oz) freshly squeezed lemon juice
50 ml (1¾ fl oz) passion fruit juice
15 ml (½ fl oz) egg white
candied pepper strip (or regular red [bell] pepper strip), to garnish
METHOD
Crush the chilli seed in the bottom of the cocktail shaker, then pour in the other ingredients and dry shake. Strain into a coupette, then garnish the top of the drink with a strip of pepper.
To many, Monaco is a sheer fantasy populated by royalty – a sunny enclave fuelled by grandiose wealth. A visit to this tiny French Riviera principality is therefore surprising, because, despite the onslaught of gold-encrusted surfaces and hefty bank accounts, it is more chill than haughty. Le Bar Américain, located inside the Belle Époque Hôtel de Paris Monte-Carlo, is one place that triumphantly straddles opulent and down-to-earth. The hotel, opened in 1864, underwent a massive renovation, which was completed in 2018, making way for two rambling suites that were co-designed by Prince Albert II in honour of his parents, Prince Rainier III and Princess Grace Kelly. Le Bar Américain sports a terrace that opens onto the Mediterranean Sea, but the softly lit interior is just as hypnotic, with mirrored panels, sweeping curtains and booze bottles tucked into arches all eliciting a hard-to-find retro-glam ambience. Steps away from Place du Casino, the bar is sure to have more than a few high-rollers leaning back in leather armchairs at any given time. They too will be revelling in their ‘Duhamel’ cocktails (Goslings rum, cider, ginger, cardamom, lime, green apple) and the sounds of live jazz.
No. 19
Meurice Millennium
BAR 228 AT LE MEURICE, PARIS, FRANCE
Created by William Oliveri
INGREDIENTS
20 ml (⅔ fl oz) Cointreau
10 ml (⅓ fl oz) crème de rose liqueur
130 ml (4⅓ fl oz) rosé Champagne
pared strip of orange zest, to garnish
METHOD
Pour the Cointreau and crème de rose into a Champagne flute. Top off with the Champagne and garnish with orange zest.
After a spell on Rue Saint-Honoré, Le Meurice moved over to Rue de Rivoli in 1835, wooing well-to-do British tourists with a premier location across from the Tuileries Garden and underneath a tasteful row of arcades. With sizable apartments, smoking and reading rooms, and private dinners then on offer, it’s no wonder Le Meurice became a favourite among royalty – beginning with Queen Victoria’s visit in 1855. The first hotel in Paris to flaunt telephones and baths in every guest room, Le Meurice retains a ritzy, 19th-century tone, starting in the gilded lobby. Contemporised with a frosted mirror and updated Louis XVI-style chairs inspired by hotel regular Salvador Dalí, it leads to the low-lit Bar 228.
It’s not the original 1936 lair, and eccentric designer Philippe Starck has spruced up the joint with pink copper, brass and stainless steel, but the dreamy painted ceiling and early 20th-century fresco panels by Alexandre Claude Louis Lavalley plunge you back to a time when guests such as Rudyard Kipling and Ginger Rogers might have sipped nightcaps at the hotel.
William Oliveri manned the bar at Le Meurice for decades, plying guests with bubbly cocktails and dry Martinis until he retired. The next generation of bartenders, thankfully, continue to intensify the impression that you are indeed somewhere special. When the hotel reopened in 2000 after a lustrous renovation, Oliveri’s celebratory cocktail went on the menu. It’s been clamoured for ever since.
No. 20
The Serendipity
BAR HEMINGWAY AT RITZ PARIS, FRANCE
Created by Colin Field
INGREDIENTS
1 fresh mint sprig
20 ml (⅔ fl oz) Calvados
30 ml (1 fl oz) apple juice
Champagne (the bar uses its own Ritz Réserve Brut Barons de Rothschild), to top up
METHOD
Add the mint sprig to a highball glass filled with ice, then pour in the Calvados and apple juice. Top up with Champagne.
There are only 35 seats at Bar Hemingway and night after night there are eager imbibers who contentedly wait to settle into one of them. Named for the peripatetic author who was so enamoured with the Ritz bar that he supposedly tried to rescue it from the Germans in 1944, then knocked back a staggering 51 dry Martinis in celebration of Paris’s liberation, Bar Hemingway might just be the globe’s most well-known hotel bar. The Ritz opened on Place Vendôme in 1898, and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Cole Porter drank here well before Bar Hemingway’s modern unveiling in 1994. History, magnified by old photographs and antiques such as a typewriter, gramophone and boxing gloves strewn about, certainly appeals to the curious queues, but the lure of the intimate room extends to the clubby blend of oak and pine-green carpeting, as well as the white-jacketed barmen. Colin Field – the most revered of them – has made the bar his home since it re-opened, dreaming up cocktails like the ‘Clean Dirty Martini’ along the way. That guests can drink one alongside petite hot dogs, the bar snack of choice, underscores how extravagance is best when there’s a dash of the amusing.
SPOTLIGHT:
A CITY COCKTAIL TOUR
ideal London imbibing joints
A BAR CRAWL THROUGH LONDON
London is arguably home to the world’s best hotel bars. Other than the three must-visit establishments at The Connaught, The Savoy and The Stafford London, there are plenty of other remarkable spots throughout the city for a welcome ‘Old Fashioned’ respite, including these:
Artesian at The Langham, London: Directly across from BBC Broadcasting House in Marylebone, The Langham, London opened in 1865. During World War II, the hotel became the stomping ground for American reporters. Named for the 111-metre- (365-feet-) deep well underneath the hotel, which once supplied fresh water for its stylish guests, Artesian’s David Collins’ interior mixes Victorian-era romance with Far-East intrigue. Menu concepts are always in flux, so look out for thematic concoctions such as the ‘minimalist’ hybrids of St-Germain liqueur and carrot or Cognac and green coffee.
The Coral Room at The Bloomsbury Hotel: With all the oomph of a 1920s grand Euro café, The Coral Room, completed by Martin Brudnizki in 2017, is a chic newcomer to the hotel bar scene. Drink a ‘May Day Spritz’ (Monkey 47 gin, Italicus Rosolio di Bergamotto, apricot honey water, Empirical Spirits Fallen Pony and Ridgeview Bloomsbury sparkling wine) against marble, Murano glass and walls painted in the bar’s namesake hue. For the second tipple, head downstairs to The Bloomsbury Club Bar. The Bloomsbury Group surely would have been eager to partake of philosophical discussions in this brooding leather-and-wood room or on the adjoining, twinkling terrace.
DUKES Bar at DUKES LONDON: No one can prove that James Bond scribe Ian Fleming was struck with inspiration for 007’s famous ‘shaken, not stirred’ motto while drinking at DUKES Bar, as some claim, but what is certain is that the Martini acquired a whole new level of cachet at this very bar in the 1980s. That’s when venerated bartender Salvatore Calabrese started working at the hotel dating from 1908 and introduced captivated clientele to his and Gilberto Preti’s ‘direct Martini’, a rendition of the drink th
at shuns ice for frozen gin. After Calabrese and Preti came Alessandro Palazzi, who – in his suave white jacket – still makes his Martinis from a mobile rosewood trolley in the same fashion. The chilled glass is first rinsed with dry vermouth made in collaboration with local distillery Sacred Spirits, the frozen gin (or vodka) is added and then the cocktail is simply finished with Palazzi’s own twist: an aromatic Amalfi-Coast lemon zest. These Martinis are so potent that only two of them can be served to any one guest.
George’s Bar at St Pancras Renaissance Hotel London: There is no more fashionable send-off to the Paris-bound Eurostar than a cocktail at the moody burgundy-and-brass George’s Bar – designed by David Collins Studio in 2018. Directly inside St Pancras International Station, this haunt adjacent to Marcus Wareing’s Gilbert Scott restaurant is an ode to George Gilbert Scott, the architect who designed this very building as the Midland Grand Hotel, a fancy 19th-century railway bolthole. With all those passengers running to and from trains, George’s is certainly a magnet for people-watching while sipping an ‘Amber Embers’ (Lapsang Souchong tea-infused Scotch, Martini Rosso, apricot, lemon, smoke) underneath the ceiling’s cluster of extraordinary original bells, but it’s hard to take your eyes off the friezes and fringed lamps.
Punch Room at The London EDITION: Although additional Punch Room locations have now sprouted in the Barcelona and Shanghai incarnations of Ian Schrager and Marriott International’s EDITION Hotels, the concept first kicked off in 2013, at the EDITION London in Fitzrovia. The original, with its fumed oak bar and surreptitiously drawn blinds straight out of a 19th-century gentlemen’s club, remains the city’s choice locale for punches that commingle ingredients such as Wild Turkey rye, Martini bitters, Martini Rubino, hibiscus tea and red (bell) pepper syrup, or a comforting cold-weather ‘Grog’ (Plantation OFTD rum, lime juice, grapefruit sherbet, Cornish Manuka tea, nutmeg).
