I Like Mine Wet

Tayer + Elemental and The Prince, Old St.

I’m going to be very honest here and say that there are very few downsides to this job, particularly if you have no moral or aesthetic reservations about mild obesity or frequent intoxication. I can think of no recommendations for improving it … save one.

Write a cocktail book.

The research is enormous fun and, of course, entirely tax deductible. When I’ve finished this one, I might just do another. In fact, I’m planning to have a cocktail book on the boil now, pretty much constantly, for the rest of my life.

Last night, though, ‘research’ took me down an unanticipated rabbit hole. There were two cocktail bars on my list that are 300m apart on Old Street, so I set out to drink at both.

Tayēr + Elementary isn’t new news. They’ve been successful for a while, but I’d never got round to visiting. If I’m honest, my personal prejudices against anything molecular or overtly hipsterish had meant that I’d routinely prioritise anywhere else. One perches on a high stool and the counter comes up to your chest, but that’s about where the comforting visual cues of the bar end. There’s a lot of exposed ventilation ducting, blonde wood, a cast cement ‘screen’ with artistic intent and a long slot window into the work space behind. That is ‘Tayēr’, inspired by the Spanish for ‘workshop’. It’s what Ferran Adrià used to call his creative space

I exert privilege to get taken back there by Alex - half of the founding partnership - where, surrounded by all the personnel and materiel of a top-level restaurant kitchen, there’s a three-sided bar with more high stools. This space, he explains, is for the ‘fine dining’ side of cocktails. Devoted to ‘mixology’. Here backed by a complex stainless steel ‘well’, custom made of biomimetic hexagonal stainless cells, bar people can hand craft individual drinks. Here, Alex explains, the customers don’t know what they’re about to be delighted by. Outside, perched in ‘Elementary’ - a name which , now I know, suggests I’m being kept back a year from junior school for being insufficiently promising - customers ‘know what they’re getting’.

I realise I haven’t seen a shaker out there in the playground and he confirms, yes … all the drinks out front are pre-batched and on tap. But here was the revelation. Most of the drinks served in Elementary contain tiny proportions of complex flavour ingredients. A gram here or there of an aromatic botanical in maybe a thousand of alcohol. There’s no way, using their standard armoury of jiggers and spoons, that even the most precise mixologist could produce those drinks reliably and consistently.

I ordered a ‘One Sip Martini’ as a pipe opener, which arrived in a tiny shot glass at perfect temperature and slightly yellow rather than clear. The ‘setup’… the ritual… was to place this next to a minimal wide/low tumbler of water and a small chrome pot of commercial pretzels on a very intentional black rough paper mat. There couldn’t have been less traditional bar theatre, but the placement was purest Japanese. No less of a performance … just more minimal.

The martini was wet. Something like 20% vermouth. But that was Martini Ambrato - A really unusual choice and, according to the menu, there was also fino sherry. I’m not sure I’d have ordered a full-size wet martini with ambrato vermouth and sherry unless I’d had some kind of catastrophic stroke, but it was sensational. It was sensational even if half the space in the tiny glass was taken up by a Nocellera olive the size of a quail’s egg stuffed with gorgonzola.

My problem here is that by any of the rules I hold dear, that is not a martini. Yet, with a skill that eludes - I’m going to say most - chefs of the ‘set menu school’, they have given me something new, that I’d never have thought of ordering and I have been delighted by it. No. More than that. Moved by it.

I ordered a Morello Cherry Sour (they have the menu on the wall like a coffeeshop) but I want to give you the whole description…

MORELLO CHERRY SOUR

Chivas Regal 12yo Whisky, Oloroso Sherry, Lemon + Morello Cherry

You see? It’s that thing they do in the 14-course joints, where they just list the ingredients and it’s as irritating as hell. Except that here, it isn’t.

I’m just marvelling now at the economy of those words, the near genius of the writing. Every word lands, and the combination instantly sounds like one you know you’re going to love. Of course it’s not just a copywriter’s legerdemain. Behind it there’s a mind dreaming the combinations up. But its almost like Alex had said; we know what we’re getting…. even if we’ve never had it before.

The Morello Cherry Sour was superb.

But then, we already knew that.

Here are a couple more. Just for fun…

CEDARWOOD OLD FASHIONED

Makers Mark Bourbon, Tayēr Aged Aquavit + Cedarwood

SANDALWOOD MARTINI

Tayer x Hepple Gin, Noilly Prat ‘Original Dry’ Vermouth + Sandalwood

I find myself in an interesting position. I can’t add anything by describing what those were like to drink. Merely that they entirely fulfilled the promise that you’ve just read. I don’t remember ever feeling that about anything on a restaurant menu.

300m is not long enough to formulate any kind of analysis but my brain is absolutely churning by this point. On one level, I feel I’ve had an astonishingly enjoyable drinking experience. Possibly one of the best. But on the other, there’s a nagging question. This bar is creating drinks, combining alcohol and flavouring elements in, if not ‘industrial’ quantities, then certainly greater than strictly artisanal. There are precise recipes. Inspired and brilliant, but researched and developed to be repeatable. It seems logical, scientific and it tastes an order-of-magnitude better than 99% of cocktails I’ve ever drunk, but I’m now walking down Old Street, shoulders hunched against freezing rain and asking myself in increasing panic…

“What even is a cocktail?”

It’s a horrible thought and I wish I hadn’t had it. Am I over-thinking this. Hell no! This is like a priest questioning the existence of God… that’s pretty high for me on the scale of existential crises.

But when the rain is leaking down your collar and your brain is squirming in ontological spasm, the thing you want to see is The Prince. It used to be a green-tiled Victorian corner boozer called The Checkers. One room, a bar halfway down one side and a running bench all the way around the outer wall. If you could find a sixty-year-old Parisian sex worker and a black and white camera, you could shoot a Brassäi in here without effort. It’s better than a film set. And no matter what’s happened to it in its long life, it’s got drink, conviviality, hospitality and human warmth soaked into its fabric like nicotine in plaster.

In fact, it’s recently been taken over by Will Hawes and Aaron Wall. Two young cocktail barmen who’ve worked their whole lives behind other people’s bars, some of them very good. And with quiet hard work, and incredible personal risk, they’ve set up on their own. It says cocktails on the front door now, but their website adds something that fleshes out their story. “Sharp, Strong and Social”. There’s none of the hotel bar glitz about The Prince. In fact, they’ve had to look to America for their model. The shell might be a pub, but what they serve seems much more like urban, neighbourhood bars in American cities. Leading not with wine or beer but ‘mixed drinks’. Simple, strong alcohol with a little something to cut it back. ‘Alcohol-forward cocktails’ to use the (revolting) current jargon. Or ‘Cocktails’, to use mine.

They mix me a Martini. In a proper glass. There’s loads of ice so when it’s stirred, the outside of Will’s ‘can’ freezes. We talk about the gin - Berry Bros & Rudd #3 … lots of martini enthusiasts favour that at the moment. Martini & Rossi vermouth … as little of it as you like. A guy with wild hair and a beard at the other end of the bar throws in an opinion. About bitters. They cut their lemon peel as ‘coins’ the better to shoot the oil onto the drink’s surface before rubbing it round the rim. Maybe a little on the stem too. Flash, but reassuringly so. In fact, it’s things like that. The care, the ritual, the attention to detail, and the shared nerd’s delight that makes it perfect.

I order another and we talk about the bottles along the back bar. The plain, famous brand old boozes, and the special ones, the fortified and aromatised wines with ancient secret recipes, the amari and ‘bitters’ with flavours unchanged for centuries, the consistent reliability of vermouth, the new rarity of Chartreuse … and I realise with an only partially alcohol induced sensation of vertigo, that every single ingredient of my cocktail has been industrially produced, to a carefully developed recipe. All contain tiny proportions of complex flavour ingredients. A gram here or there of an aromatic botanical in maybe a thousand of alcohol. All designed to be delivered with 100% consistency.

The method of making and the service at The Prince might be more raw, more personal. It might draw on deeper shared cultural touch points. It’s got a feel of ‘neighbourhood’. You might even say it was more craft than science. But what they’re doing at Tayēr + Elementary is conceptually, philosophically, technically identical to what they’re doing at Martini and Rossi or Berry Bros. & Rudd. Where the treasured components of my perfect Martini have been honed.

Tayēr and Elementary, like the most influential Modernist restaurants, is designed to avoid all traditional tropes and focus the on the purity of flavours and the creativity of their combination. And it is fair to argue that traditionally, ‘Cocktails’ have been around 75% trope.

Can you see my difficulty here?

But actually, my ‘compare and contrast’ research trip has helped. I think I know what a cocktail is now, because, though they couldn’t be more dissimilar, I like Tayēr + Elementary and The Prince equally. They form new brackets at the ends of my perception. Though their products are entirely different and their rituals a thousand miles apart, I experience both as ‘cocktails’, and, until I can work out a better one, this is the definition I’m going with.

I suggest you go to Tayēr + Elementary and The Prince. Maybe start with the one you think you’ll like least. Physically, at least, there’s only 300 metres between them. And what’s that between friends?