It has been a busy year so far – we opened Untitled in Dalston in February, Bar Termini Centrale in Marylebone in May, and we have just opened our first place outside of the UK in Cognac, France – but busy is the way we like it! You have to take every opportunity as it comes.
In London, the bar scene is always changing and there is always something new to try. We are very lucky in London, with it being such a cosmopolitan city you can find something to suit all tastes, be it a local pub, unique cocktail bar or high-end hotel bar. For us it’s about creating spaces where the community can engage with us, and that are accessible and approachable for everyone. The bars are whatever people want them to be, which is why they don’t have names, but instead are called The Bar With No Name or Untitled.
(Image credit: Addie Chinn)
Marylebone is a great location for the second Bar Termini – it has a lot of passing customers looking for a cocktail or coffee. The space is a little bigger than Bar Termini on Old Compton Street in Soho, which gives us more room to welcome our loyal following. We also have a lovely terrace – perfect for an aperitif cocktail – and have built upon our existing food menu at Bar Termini to offer some of my favourite Italian dishes and snacks.
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With Untitled it made perfect sense to open a bar in east London. Drink Factory, our research kitchen for all of the bars, has been based in east London for a few years now and we have lots of friends in the area. East London still has a great creative community that we really enjoy engaging with too; that’s a concept at the heart of Untitled.
At Untitled and at The Bar With No Name at 69 Colebrooke Row, my first London cocktail bar that opened in 2009, a lot of our cocktails have unusual flavours such as ‘clay’ or ‘beeswax’. We are constantly searching for new ingredients and looking to different areas for inspiration, be it a foreign food culture, history or different perfume notes. That way you don’t miss any opportunity to discover something new. It’s not about challenging people’s palates, our goal is to always make tasty drinks and give impeccable service. But over the years we’ve found that guests are more intrigued by unusual favours and combinations, so have gradually built up to creating drinks such as Violin (a mix of dark oak, pine, beeswax, benzoin, and black pepper vodka infusions) and Snow (created with white clay, chalk, and enoki vodka), which we serve at Untitled.
That’s where the Drink Factory comes in, the lab in which our cocktails are created and tasted by a group of people before going on the menu at our bars. We taste as a group as it’s important to get as wide a view of the drink as possible and if opinions differ you can learn more about the drink. All of our bar staff go through the Drink Factory lab on a weekly basis to prep ingredients and that helps to maintain and drive the very high standards we set for all of our bars.
I’ll be travelling this summer to get more ideas for ingredients and flavours and I’ll be checking on my new bar in Cognac, Luciole. This bar has a menu of cognac-based cocktails with some created to reflect the house from which the brandy comes. It’s a way of celebrating one of the world’s finest liquors in a new and exciting way.
Bar Termini Centrale, 31 Duke Street, W1U 1LG; bar-termini.com
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