Bars & Pubs

By Ben McFarland

This smart new cocktail bar is hidden down a quiet side street off Essex Road. It's an elegant, intimate, low-lit Italian cocktail lounge holding just 40 people. It's fitted out in a 1950s film noir theme lacquered in blacks, reds and white with a piano in the corner. The bijou bar is manned, with sharp-creased panache, by legendary bartender and founder Tony Conigliaro, formerly of Roka and Zuma.

Congiliaro has created the El Bullì of booze. A molecular drinks-maker who works with perfumists, scientists, sommeliers, distillers and designers, he has his own high-tech laboratory above the bar where he experiments with elixirs, aromas and essences to craft a stunning collection of cocktails, all priced at £7. For example, the Wild Strawberry Bellini flexes strawberry flavours out of incongruous ingredients; the Consulate, a mix of El Dorado rum and sherry, is a expertly crafted twist on a classic. The bar also has its very own Cognac, blended specifically to complement the Spitfire cocktail.

To eat, there are aperitivo nibbles of choice meats, cheeses and other Milanese munchies. Entertainment consists of regular ivory-tinkling, singers and, for the dedicated followers discerning drinking, the occasional cocktail seminar. As you might expect, the regulars are the more adventurous imbibers of Islington and cocktail cognoscenti who travel to see the master at work.

Heard at the bar: ‘The tongue map, with sweet at the front and bitter at the back, is nonsense. Tear it up.' So best not ask for a bottle of WKD then.

Time Out London June 2009