February 7, 2007: The New York Times.

The Best Town to Make an Upper Lip Stiff

By KATE SEKULES

LONDON is the best cocktail city in the world right now,” Audrey Saunders
said. “I hate to admit it, but it’s true.”

The confession is difficult because Ms. Saunders, an owner of the Pegu Club
on Houston Street, is seen as the torchbearer for New York City’s own
bartending resurgence. But she has sampled beverages from Paris to
Tortola, and she is convinced that London has more bartenders turning out
more sophisticated drinks than any other place.

“Even though it’s coming along here, our talent is nowhere near as
widespread,” she said. “If I hadn’t started Pegu Club, I’d probably be in
London. I just love what’s going on in the scene. The bartenders are so
extraordinary — the professionalism and the skill level and the passion.”

Ten years ago, with the opening of a handful of “proper cocktail”

establishments, London mixology was in its protozoan stage: the mere
appearance of fresh fruit juice in a cocktail glass was considered a giant
evolutionary leap. Cocktails caught on, and soon lesser bars were seeking
attention with absurd drinks like bacon martinis. Which is why the explosion
of sheer quality and variety in the city now strikes connoisseurs of mixed
drinks as so fortunate and so welcome.

At certain restaurants — Zuma, Roka, Hakkasan, Baltic — the people behind

the bar are more of a draw than those in the kitchen. Recently renewed
hotel bars — the Bar at the Dorchester, the Lobby Bar at One Aldwych,
Artesian at the Langham Hotel, Claridge’s Bar, the Blue Bar at the Berkeley
— are irresistible again, from their soigné décor to their deep and focused
drinks lists. Stand-alone boîtes that look as if Bond just left (Milk & Honey,
Montgomery Place) or Barbarella is about to arrive (the Lonsdale, Trailer
Happiness) publish booklet menus with whole sections of rye, shochu, Pisco
and cachaça drinks alongside the gins and cognacs.

These bars squeeze and press their juices daily, partially defrost and
refreeze their mineral-water ice for density and purity and keep libraries of
precious liquors. Bartenders outdo each other to corral the most outré
bottles: Antica Formula, Dolin Chambéryzette, Wokka Saki Vodka, Penderyn
single malt Welsh whiskey. Everyone keeps Martin Miller’s gin from Notting
Hill, liqueurs of violet and prickly pear (but not chocolate), Lillet and
absinthe (without wormwood).

Asked to nominate the most professional, skilled and passionate London

barkeep of all, Ms. Saunders gave the same answer as everybody else: Dick
Bradsell. “He’s completely unassuming and so low-key, but he’s one of the
greats,” she said. Mr. Bradsell usually gets credit for founding the modern
era of London cocktails when he opened Dick’s Bar in 1994. (In fact, his
tenure as founding mixologist goes back another decade to the semi-
legendary clubs Fred’s and the Zanzibar.) Not since the Art Deco era, when
Harry Craddock ruled the Savoy — London’s premier classic martini
destination — had a bartender’s name enjoyed such cachet. As Ms. Saunders
put it, “Any time you find Dick at a bar, that’s the place to be.”

Mr. Bradsell earned his renown with an exhaustive knowledge of classic

cocktails, precision and speed in constructing them, and, especially, a
cheflike ability to build on them continually. “He’s a genius,” said Claire
Smith, one of the successful young mixologists he has trained. “So many
cocktails that we think of as classics in London were actually Dick’s
inventions.”

At Dick’s Bar, in an era of tequila slammers and flavored vodkas, Mr.

Bradsell’s sophisticated, balanced drinks served in retro glassware hit a
chord. It became the hottest place in town, its status not exactly hindered
by its rare late-night license. Then, as with Alice Waters in 1970s Berkeley,
so with Dick Bradsell in 1990s London: his ideas, his trainees and his drinks
went forth and multiplied.

Three years after starting Dick’s, Mr. Bradsell opened MatchBar with
Jonathan Downey, a former lawyer who found the call of the other kind of
bar stronger. “One of the many things Dick said to me at the beginning was,
People will always buy quality,” Mr. Downey said. “And he was right.” By
1997, cocktail bars were proliferating, but they were often more concerned
with style than substance — a tendency Mr. Downey and Mr. Bradsell
deplored and set out to correct. Mr. Downey’s Match Bar Group now owns
five London bars displaying both attributes. “We’re democratizing the
quality cocktail,” he said.
One of the five is the louche, speakeasy-like Milk & Honey, a four-story
former Soho strip club inspired by the clandestine bar of the same name on
the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Mr. Downey had been taken to the New
York original several years ago by Dale DeGroff, the American mixologist
who has branded himself “King Cocktail,” with some justification. One year
later Mr. Downey hired him as a drinks consultant to the Match Bar Group
and opened his own Milk & Honey in London.

The list of drinks by Sasha Petraske, the owner of Milk & Honey in New York,
features a few classics — margarita, mai tai, stinger — among some 40
originals, like the Cubanada (light rum, lime, maple syrup), the Cock a
Bendy (Scotch, sweet vermouth, Campari) and the Rye Port Cobbler (rye,
port, Curaçao, lemon, orange, pineapple). All are served in refreshingly
retro-size compact glasses.

Mr. DeGroff, who has been following the rise of mixology in London since
1996, says he believes that city has a barhopping problem: “young creative
bartenders jumping from bar to bar” before cashing in as consultants (which
he understands, being one himself) or brand representatives. “There are
very interesting cutting-edge cocktails coming from London,” he said. “But
the problem is consistency, and it’s exacerbated by the lack of a strong
tipping tradition at bars.”

Mr. Downey and Ms. Saunders say they believe the opposite: that tips ruin
drinks. “Over there, they’re career bartenders,” Ms. Saunders said. “Here
they’re mostly actors.”

Robert Wattie, who oversees the chic and towering Lobby Bar at One
Aldwych hotel — at nine years old, another early adopter of proper cocktails
— agrees. “Europeans consider cocktail bartending a real profession,” Mr.
Wattie said. “You start off at the bottom, polishing glasses, learning about
spirits and balancing the drink.”

Mr. Wattie was a chef before apprenticing with Peter Dorelli, the longtime
manager of the bar at the Savoy, and his drink recipes draw on both
experiences. Judiciously, he uses herbs, spices and seasonal fruit (“3,000
pounds a year, not counting limes”) in black-currant or blackberry
Caprioskas (vodka caipirinhas) or in a startling Thai martini with ginger-
infused Stolichnaya and syrup, minced cilantro, lemon grass and kaffir lime.
Though he just took over an additional bar at the Dukes Hotel, London’s
runner-up classic martini destination, he claims to enjoy the fun of working
with the customers far too much to disappear into back-room management.

Of course, lemon grass and ginger syrup in the hands of the wrong bartender
can lead to disaster. Few people understand this better than Robbie Bargh,
the creative director of the Gorgeous Group, the consulting concern behind
many of London’s splashiest new joints. An ebullient, opinionated former
mixologist and bar manager with 16 years’ experience, Mr. Bargh said he has
no time for “egotistical demigods” behind the bar who don’t bother with
the fundamentals.

“We’re going through a big backlash to over-mixology,” he said. “I think like

a chef. Like a chef, you can’t deliver innovation without renovation. You
can’t modernize without a basic understanding of what it takes to make a
great classic drink — why a Negroni is so different made with Aperol rather
than Campari.”

This kind of geekery is the last thing to strike a person visiting one of Mr.
Bargh’s establishments, where serious mixology is wrapped in luxury
frivolity. Take the Bar, an extravaganza just completed at the Dorchester. A
very camp Mephistopheles would feel right at home here, on a scarlet
banquette before a mirrored table, backed by a forest of six-foot red glass
spikes, sipping an Inca’s Passion from a giant glass with a three-foot stem.
This mixture of La Diablada Pisco, passion fruit and lime is definitely a
cocktail to drink, in the words of Harry Craddock, “quickly, while it’s still
laughing at you.” Craddock would probably have gotten a kick from the
Genesis of the Martini too: a history of that cocktail in three petite glasses.

Artesian at the Langham is a contrasting new work in the Gorgeous Group’s

portfolio, designed by David Collins (who did the Blue and Claridge’s Bar)
with Regencyesque chandeliers, leather floors, grand classical proportions
and a milk-chocolate-and-ice palette. The list goes deep and broad on a
foundation of 54 rums, from stalwarts like Mount Gay and Appleton to
recent contenders like rums from St. Lucia and agricoles from Martinique.

Mr. Bargh’s personal taste runs more to the classic than his Gorgeous
lounges would suggest. “I’m a proper drinks man,” he said. “My desert
island luxury is Brian Silva and a bar.” Mr. Silva, who comes from Boston,
has been tending London bars for 25 years and is found behind a classic
mahogany number next to the grand piano in the underdecorated, old-
school Connaught Hotel. “When I go back to the U.S.A. everything seems
sweet,” he said. “Flavored vodkas, flowers and bits and pieces — pinkie-
raising drinks. No. All my cocktails are made with alcohol.”

Of all the gin joints in London, Mr. Silva’s may be the one with the most
inviting bar stools and some of the most creative drinks, like Le Blond, a
champagne cocktail involving absinthe, French liqueurs and pepper vodka.
Unfortunately, the Connaught Hotel will be closing the bar to revamp it this
spring.

But even bars without the solidly classic appearance of Mr. Silva’s may have
equally rich and serious menus. Notting Hill has a deep seam of intimate,
high-style places: Trailer Happiness, a frivolous basement with solid tiki-
kitsch cocktails devised by Mr. DeGroff; the sexy, penumbral little
Montgomery Place with its “Rat Pack in Havana” drinks; and the space-age
Lonsdale, with a list by Mr. Bradsell in collaboration with the manager,
Henry Besant, and Claire Smith.

In the West End, there’s Tony Conigliaro, widely viewed as the No. 1
Bradsell protégé. At Shochu Lounge, you can taste his heterodox approach in
inventions like the Plum Plum (ume shochu, plum vodka, plum Tzu) and
Bellinis of green tea and pear, or of rhubarb and almond. Meanwhile, in the
laboratory of the Fat Duck restaurant just outside London, Mr. Conigliaro is
developing avant-garde cocktails in collaboration with the chef Heston
Blumenthal.

Of course, molecular mixology had to happen, but it’s not necessarily where
a cocktail lover wishes to go. So, following the city’s mixological history
back to the beginning, it turns out that the London bar in which to be at the
moment is a smoky, strictly-members-only lair on Dean Street with peeling
paint work, a single bald banquette and artworks by current and former
members like Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.
This is the Colony Room, and it’s where Dick Bradsell can be found these
days, out of the limelight — not so much mixing as pouring and, by all
accounts, happy as a lamb.