Free-spirited libations

Think mad-scientist apothecary and you’re almost there: at Tokyo’s 15-seater Bar Benfiddich, bartender Hiroyasu Kayama is a farmer, ingredient curator, collector of curiosities and expert mixologist who creates every cocktail bespoke. There’s no menu, so, instead, he blends what he knows will satisfy your mood, personality and taste. And he does so using antique bottles of aged spirits, homemade alcoholic elixirs and unique tinctures – plus herbs, fruit and other fresh ingredients from his family farm. Beyond the culturally-engrained devotion to omotenashi, or hospitality, his one-of-a-kind concoctions are an expression of an obsessive quest for perfection.

Such extreme individualism is a far cry from the globalised cosmopolitanism encountered by a soul-searching Bill Murray at his hotel bar depicted in Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. That film turned the chichi high-altitude watering hole at Tokyo’s Park Hyatt into an outpost of late-capitalist ennui and anodyne drinks stripped of personality.

But times have changed. And cocktail bars are evolving.

Around the world, spirits are soaring as bartenders lean into maximal inventiveness, opening up space for unbridled – and sometimes outlandish – creativity. They’re experimenting with left-field flavours, whether in minimalist masterpieces or savoury drinks showcasing umami’s multidimensionality. There are eye-popping twists on classics, but we’re simultaneously witnessing moments of boundary-pushing audaciousness.

Along with new spirits, obscure flavour profiles and hitherto undreamed of ingredients, mixologists are toying with taste-intensifying techniques such as fat-washing (a process whereby alcohol is infused with a flavour-enhanced liquid fat before being frozen, causing the fats to solidify so they can be removed from the unfrozen alcohol which retains all the flavour as well as a gorgeously silky mouthfeel). And augmenting recipes with everything from heirloom vegetables to grated cheese and meat shavings – at the extremes of the cocktail spectrum, nothing’s off-limits. 

That might mean levelling-up dirty martinis with ‘soil scent’ (as they do at Artesian in London), or by adding miso and mushrooms or seaweed and fish shavings for a savoury spike. At New York’s Double Chicken Please, there’s one cocktail that tastes like a Waldorf salad and another that combines Irish whiskey, coffee butter, corn, walnuts, wild mushrooms and heated charcuterie strips.

Barcelona’s Paradiso uses tahini and sweet potato in its ‘On Fire’ blend of bourbon and smoky Calvados. In Hong Kong, The Savory Project serves a ‘Thai Beef Salad’, which is actually a cocktail of clarified peanut rum, shaken with beef essence, coconut water, bird’s eye chilli and kaffir lime. In another sign
of the times, the bar has an entire ‘Temperance’ section on its menu for abstainers.

Cambridge Public House is a slice of the British pub scene located in the Marais district of Paris where bartenders like to create drinks with names like ‘Golden Child’. Described as ‘carrot cake in a glass’, it’s made using carrot-cake cordial, Philadelphia cream, cognac and Naked Malt whisky. More French, perhaps, is their ‘Cigarette After Sex’, which is a velvet-smooth combination of Agua de Jamaica, Elephant Sloe Gin and Del Maguey Vida Mezcal.

At Singapore’s women-owned Fura, there’s a ‘Jellyfish Martini’ combining jellyfish-infused gin, distillate from the peppery fish leaf plant, spirulina-infused dry vermouth, and oil infused with roasted kelp. The umami-forward cocktail list includes a vodka-based drink with a floating island of kombu ice-cream onto which you scoop vegan caviar made from black garlic.

And at Mexico City’s Handshake Speakeasy, 2024’s greatest bar on the planet according to The World’s 50 Best Bars, there’s an on-site laboratory where advanced culinary techniques are used to experimentally develop drinks that will eventually each take around 48 hours to prepare for service. Most of this activity involves using high-tech culinary equipment to extract flavours from fresh food ingredients – the trick is to get the final drink to a silky-smooth consistency so your brain battles to match the texture with the taste. The magic lies in being taken to the edge of disbelief.

Mixology’s adoption of culinary ingredients and newfangled techniques is trickling into Africa’s burgeoning cocktail scene, too. It’s a scene that’s getting a well-deserved boost thanks to two spirits industry stalwarts, Ghanaian-born US-based Colin Asare-Appiah (co-author of Black Mixcellence: A Comprehensive Guide To Black Mixology) and Mark Talbot Holmes (founder of U’Luvka Vodka), who last year launched Ajabu (‘wondrous’ in Swahili), a biannual cocktail bar festival. Taking place in Johannesburg and Cape Town, it aims to bring international focus to the continent’s cocktail culture.

In a tucked-away location in Mexico City’s Colonia Juárez neighbourhood, Handshake Speakeasy, with it’s black-and-gold Gatsby aesthetic, was dubbed best bar in the world last year. 

There’s certainly a need for it, given the relative obscurity of bars here. In 2024, not a single African venue was listed among The World’s 50 Best Bars, and just two appeared on its 50 next-best ones-to-watch list. 

One of those is Sin+Tax (ranked 81 in the world), a not-so-secret secret bar in Rosebank that once entertained David Beckham. More interesting, though, is Nairobi’s Hero (75th on the list). Up on the ninth floor of the Trademark Hotel, it’s a themed speakeasy that playfully celebrates comic-book superheroes. But their real innovation is that they’ve turned African ingredients into cocktail heroes. There’s Procera African Gin in their ‘Kijabe Kayama’, for example, and their ‘Plantain Old Fashioned’ is made with plantain banana syrup, fried plantain, plantain dust and plantain butter-washed whisky.

At Accra’s Front/Back, a lively club inside a gallery, bartenders are augmenting gin cocktails with ingredients like moringa, dandelion and lemongrass, and showcasing that key West African crop, cacao, in a bourbon-based cocktail named after the bar’s co-founder, a Ghanaian chef and activist named Selassie Atadika. 

Lagos is also an emerging hub of cocktail innovation, nowhere more so than at upscale restaurants like The Smiths. It’s perhaps the go-to spot in West Africa for adventuresome drinks served in extravagant vessels and with enough theatrical dazzle that the cocktail menu includes a movie camera icon signifying those you might want to film as they arrive on your table.

Back in Johannesburg, at Smoking Kills in Melville, the skater-bar edginess is fuelled by mouthy bartenders and provocative artworks that vilify corrupt politicians. Their cocktails are mad. ‘Atchar Lipgloss’, for example, is vetkoek-washed Naked Malt whisky with mango atchar and homemade mango chutney syrup, plus a bit of mustard seed, some honey and whey. The taste – and the effect – is meant to transport you to those after-school days eating vetkoek and spaza slap tjips on the side of the road. Your grease-lined lips will gleam like they’re covered in lipgloss. Their take on an espresso martini is the ‘Moer Koffie Martini’, and will remind you of coffee made with condensed milk and eating an Ouma rusk.

While there’s a strongly theatrical element to the décor and access-by-secret-password drama at the front door, what goes on behind the bar at The Art of Duplicity reflects an entirely serious focus on innovative, imaginative and unlikely-sounding mixed drinks.

Engaging in a similar game of playful inventiveness is Cape Town’s original ‘secret’ speakeasy, The Art of Duplicity, where a password is demanded before you enter an 1894 Victorian warehouse via an alleyway with underwear dangling overhead. Inside, you can try quirkily imagined drinks such as the ‘Cereal Killer Milk Punch’ (Rémy Martin VSOP, Bacardi 8, Port Charlotte heavily-peated single malt whisky, guava, mulled spices, lime, cornflakes and jaggery), or the even more kitchen-centric ‘Niwatori Tea’ with Japanese Nikka Coffey Whisky, mushroom sherry, spiced tea syrup, kombu bitters and chicken consommé, accompanied by chicken skins.

Across town, in the candlelit interior of Talking to Strangers, every non-alcoholic ingredient is made in-house. A must try? ‘Mielieeees.’ It’s made by fat-washing reposado tequila with caramelised bourbon butter and then combined with syrup infused with charred corn on the cob. They add a bit of chilli oil and fresh lime, shake it up, and serve it with tahini on the rim.

And then there’s Tokyo-born Tetsuo Hasegawa, bartender and owner of bijou city-centre gem, Anthm, which he opened in 2024, after 20 years in New York where he co-founded two bars. ‘I do my own thing, create cocktails using imagination and local inspiration,’ he says. His menu features a small, regularly-changing selection of studiously crafted tipples such as his ‘Beat-Nik’, a combination of beetroot, Durban masala, apple shrub and milk-washed tequila, and ‘All Night Boogie’, made with Cape brandy, Shiraz, banana, white miso and dark chocolate.

However, Hasegawa believes it’s not just the drinks that make for the perfect cocktail bar. ‘No, the whole thing must be an experience, like stepping into another world,’ he says. ‘The ideal bar is like total art, almost like being in a movie.’ This he achieves by taking a page out of Bar Benfiddich’s playbook, aiming to provide an ultra-personalised experience like no other, playing only LPs on an old-school turntable, using ingredients he’s made or foraged himself, and making a point of looking you in the eye as he tries to glean precisely what sort of libation will be a perfect match for you.

Keith Bain