Lab 22 is not only the best-known bar in Wales, its fame has spread far and wide. And with its focus on regional sourcing, it has become a community hub. Hamish Smith sits down at the bar of this forward-thinking venue.

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You’ve heard of a Startender, well, the one in front of me at Lab 22 might better be referred to as a Star Back. “He’s the best bar back in the business”, agrees bartender Ewan Grieve in front of me, smiling over at his boss Tani Hasa, who is furiously washing and stacking glasses at his own dedicated station. He doesn’t need to be, of course. Hasa’s Lab 22 is one of the UK’s best-known bars – and by the looks of this Monday night, it’s thriving. But instead of taking in the live jazz, enjoying the world-class cocktails, Hasa’s in the zone. Bar backing is his happy place.

As I digest our chats from earlier that day, in which Hasa talked about his love for service, for hospitality and his wish for Lab to be a hub to the Cardiff community, it has that bit more resonance. Here is a hospitality man. And these modest qualities have underpinned his ownership of Lab, ever since he took over what was a members’ club a decade ago.

Hasa switched the thinking from exclusive to inclusive, and over the years created a team of some of the UK’s best bartenders. The drinks climbed the gears and gradually the bar started to take on more of a local approach to ingredient sourcing. In 2022 Lab launched Theories + Frontiers – the first of what became a three-part series of science-based menus called Research + Development. The first volume won The World’s 50 Best Bars inaugural Best Menu award in 2022, a feat it went on to repeat in the UK in the Class Bar Awards that same year – and for the following edition in 2023. This wasn’t just a bar with great drinks, it had a growing reputation for its no-blind-spots, hospitality-led experience. In 2023 and 2024, Class named it the Best Bar in Wales. The voting wasn’t even close. 

So, Lab has become the community hub of Hasa’s vision, but it’s far from a one-trick bartender’s bar. This is a venue which attracts the young and old, customers from near and far – anywhere from London to the Valleys. It’s a busy bar for all the right reasons.

So mission complete? Not quite. It’s time to give back some more. The new menu has seen a real sharpening of the bar’s focus. It wishes now not to be just Wales’s most famous bar but a showcase of the country, its communities, its producers and their ingredients. I find out more from Hasa and right-hand man Max Hayward about the bar’s new direction.

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Tani Hasa and Max Hayward on the new direction of Lab 22

The new menu, ACT, feels like a new direction for LAB – tell us about the idea and how it came into being It’s a bit of a shift from our science-themed menus of the past, but the ideas behind it are not new to us at all.

For years, the principles of Accessibility, Community, Transparency have underpinned all of the work we do, albeit more in the background than on the face of things. We never really set a plan for what would come after the Research + Development trilogy; all we knew is that we wanted to celebrate our Welshness, and really fly the flag for our country in the bar scene.

The idea of the ACT menu came about through a conversation Tani and I had while setting up the venue one day. We were talking about Tim, our honey supplier. We’ve been using his honey for years – I used it in a competition, and he was so friendly, keen to help out and enthusiastic about his trade, and that passion is infectious. He invited the team up to the apiary to show us the beehives and how he extracts the honey.

It was amazing to learn exactly where our ingredient came from and get to know the people behind it. We decided that we would only use his honey going forward – it’s worth the extra cost to have a better product and support someone local. After seeing the producer in action, all of the team could speak really passionately about our honey, and again that passion is infectious – the guests would get excited about it too, and it adds to the experience of the bar.

What’s more, Tim was approached by a gin brand to help develop a honeyed gin, and he was really thankful as if we hadn’t been singing his praises, posting about his honey on our socials, and spreading the love with our guests, he wouldn’t have had that opportunity.

We talked about how amazing that is. That’s what it’s all about. We help support a local independent doing amazing work, and in turn their ingredients elevate both our drinks and our guest experience. We thought how this fits so well with our principles of Accessibility, Community, Transparency that we’ve been using for years, and we soon noticed that the words spelled ACT and that was the lightbulb moment.

How amazing would it be to do a whole menu of similar stories to Tim? Where we give back to a local Welsh business with every drink. Where their produce elevates our cocktails, and our cocktails elevate their business. Where we know exactly where (and more importantly who) our ingredients come from, and we can channel that passion into our guest experience. 

But importantly, we didn’t want to just find some Welsh apples and say “look, Welsh apples” and have that be the end of it – we wanted to really build meaningful relationships with our producers.

At the end of the day, that’s what gets us out of bed every day, providing those experiences and elevating those around us.

The cocktail industry has historically prioritised exoticism over localism – how do you balance the need for recognisable brands with ingredients and products found closer to home?

It’s pretty easy to source ingredients locally if you know where to look. You’d be surprised at how many people are doing amazing work you had no idea were there – all it takes is to look around. When it comes to local alcohol brands, part of what we’re doing is trying to elevate them and make them more recognisable, such as our local vineyard Llanerch, or Hive Mind Meadery just outside Newport. Of course, people still want to see the brands they know, so it takes some care to find the balance between showcasing the established brands and local ones.

But it isn’t just recognisable brands, it’s recognisable flavours. Research shows that the most popular cocktail flavours are mango, passion fruit, pineapple, strawberry, raspberry and orange. Only two of those grow in the UK, so getting the others is almost always going to involve something that isn’t local. But this is where we have to think outside the box a bit. The producers with whom we collaborate range from potters making the vessel of the drink, to chocolatiers making a garnish, to a community allotment which gives us whatever they have in the garden at the time. This diversity of producers we work with means we can get those recognisable flavours in the drinks alongside both local and more established brands.

Working with local suppliers and being a showcase of your natural and cultural environment gives Lab a sense of place. Is this how you see your role in the community and do you think it’s possible to project this sense of Welshness to the wider industry?

I think it absolutely gives us a sense of place, and that was one of the main goals with ACT. You can go anywhere and get a cocktail with tea in it, but only in Lab can you get one with tea grown in Wales, about 10 miles from the bar. Showing the world what South Wales has to offer is really important to us, and people like to know where their food and drink comes from, and they appreciate the transparency. 

What we wanted to do is take that sense of place and inject it into the guest experience. As I said before, passion is infectious, and working with Welsh producers who we know on a personal level rubs off on guests and creates a really special kind of feeling. In our locals, it gives a bit of national pride, and to those travelling to Cardiff we really feel it serves up a uniquely South Wales experience.

We also wanted to use some Welsh alcohol brands. Scotland and Ireland have their own iconic whisky industries, and England is the home of gin (before everyone and their mum started making it). Wales often feels like the forgotten middle child of the UK – we’ve actually got a rich history of alcohol production ourselves, and we really wanted to highlight this in the same way a Scottish bar might showcase their selection of Scotch.

On the menu alone, we have Welsh whisky, wine, vermouth, mead and gin, all made by passionate and skilled people who are masters of their crafts. Having these on our back bar and in our menu helps expose these Welsh brands to the world, and highlight the awesome work being done here in Wales.

How has this approach changed the way the team approaches drinks making?

It was a bit of a weird process. Normally you outline the flavours and serves you want, then develop the drinks around that, but this time we had to gather all 15 of our local producers first before we could assign any flavours to drinks. For example, one of our producers makes marmalade, so we didn’t want someone making another drink with orange as the key flavour.

The creative process was really invigorating and challenging, it forced us to think outside the box a bit more. We have a team meeting every Monday anyway, and during the menu development we got a big whiteboard with all of the local suppliers on them, and talked about our ideas and what we’d been working on.

Communication was key. Lots of drinks were chopped and changed, and we even had two suppliers drop out of the project before Christmas so we had to go back to the drawing board with them. It was a bumpy road, and especially challenging for the newer team members who haven’t done much menu development before, but each and every person rose to the challenge. I’m so proud of the team, how far they’ve come and the creativity and professionalism they exhibited in bringing this menu to life.

Talk us through some of the drinks that best showcase local suppliers

I think my favourite thing about this menu is the variety of suppliers we use. Garden Margarita (pictured centre) is really interesting. We work with a community garden in the north of Cardiff , who grow different things throughout the year. The drink itself will change every month or two, depending on what they’re growing. It’s hyper-local and hyper-seasonal, which makes it unique. To keep it consistent, the base will always be Vivir tequila, the serve will always be the same, and the garnish will look the same but change flavour with the drink. The first one is an apple and sage version with a sage and olive oil cracker garnish, using sage and apples from Global Gardens. Who knows what the next one could be.

Samba! (left) is one where the garnish itself is the local ingredient. Andrea, a Brazilian living in Newport, runs Bossa Nova Chocolate and makes us a custom chocolate bonbon to adorn the drink. We sat down with her and discussed what flavours she could do while still keeping the chocolate vegan. We landed on mango, so she went and developed a vegan white chocolate bonbon with mango puree and coconut cream in the centre, while we developed the drink – Reyka vodka, Fair Kumquat liqueur, mango clarified with vanilla soy yogurt, and Franklin & Sons pineapple and almond soda. It was really cool developing the drink alongside Andrea, it really felt like a team effort.

Claymaker (right) is one where the local supplier makes the vessel itself! Lizz from Betula Ceramics makes pottery, plates, sculptures and more, all inspired by the Welsh landscape – of industrial architecture meeting nature. All we did was give her the dimensions of the vessel we needed, as we wanted her to put her own signature aesthetic on it – after all, this is about showcasing her, not us. We love the result – a beautiful ceramic vessel in keeping with the Betula look. The drink itself is Hennessey VS, crème de cacao, macademia and hazelnut orgeat, and oat cream.