Câv, a new hybrid bar serving pre-batched bottled cocktails alongside wines, has Joe Wadsack wondering if this is the next big step in hospitality.
I am settled in a warm, cosy corner of a bar on a foray up-town with my wife. I have selected a bottle from the drinks list and a couple of plates of gorgeous presunto ham and some whipped smoked bacalhau from the guest Portuguese chef in residence. A charming fellow has just pulled a perfectly chilled bottle out of our ice bucket and begins to pour.
What did I choose to drink? It’s a Hibiscus Collins, perfectly blended, pre-mixed and ordered off the menu right next to the other more vinous sparking choices. A 75cl bottle of cocktail in an ice bucket in a brasserie? Fantasy surely?
Well, not now. Dram wünderkind Chris Tanner has joined forces with Islington wine bar supremo Edwin Frost on a Bethnal Green bar and food concept called Câv, which wants to create exactly that. A bar intent on presenting premixed spirit-based drinks in larger-format bottles at the table, the idea being that you drink it like a bottle of wine.
“Rather than the theatrics of a four-person punch, I don’t see why my partner and I can’t share a skilfully made Whisky Highball, carefully diluted, but offering the same level of interest as a bottle of fizz,” says Tanner. “We aim to exist in that liminal space where you can use us as a base for an evening of food crawling and cocktails, or perhaps you could just hole up in the corner with a bottle and a few plates.”
If it were to take off, could this cocktail-wine bar hybrid change the landscape? With fine dining also at the centre of the project on Paradise Row, it will certainly be breaking new ground in what it is offering the customer from one venue. And if Frost is involved, Tanner’s plan clearly isn’t to conquer the wine bar space with a cocktail-based alternative, but for low-ish alcohol pre-batched drinks to co-exist alongside avant-garde orange and natural wines, creating a new format.
Quality and consistency
Pre-batching is nothing new, of course. But designing a menu that is predicated on pre-bottled cocktails does require a mindset change. Philip David, Director of Distil + Fill, high-quality batch pre-mix specialists, and bar manager of Silk Stockings in Dalston tells us that a bar with this approach should be run and operated like a top kitchen. “When someone orders a roast, you don’t start peeling carrots,” he says. “Pre-batching guarantees quality and consistency, regulates weights and measures and rules out those mistakes that occur under the pressure of service – missing out the sugar in a drink for example, which will inevitably happen when you’re six deep in a busy bar.
“Here at Silk’s I have two freezers behind the bar set at -23° which, during service will always be at around -10°. That means that my Martinis, Manhattans, Gimlets are ready to go and can be served in literally seconds.”
Customer tastes clearly vary hugely across the city. Paradise Row itself is special, situated right in the centre of the Cocktail/ Hipster Wine Bar Venn diagram – people come to The Row for its diversity and to try new stuff out – there can’t be a better spot for this hybrid venture. It has been a hospitality test-bed for more than a decade, “and still is” notes Tanner.
Ciarán Smith, director and co-founder of the The Bottle Cocktail Shop, Islington wine bar, cocktail tap and online premixed cocktail dispensary, is another trailblazer in the area and sees any innovation in the premixed space as further strengthening the movement. “Bottle service reinforces what premixed cocktails are and the message that pre-batching is a statement of quality, especially in light of most consumers’ perceptions of what they have seen, or perhaps experienced from, say, a supermarket cocktail in a can.
“It’s taken the best part of two years to negate that perception with our local customers here. Pouring premixed cocktails from a bottle in front of the customer can only help to reinforce your brand. It certainly helps that some of The World’s 50 Best Bars are proudly serving what they call a Freezer Martini or Negroni, because that celebrates the fact that they are premixes. Câv, like Dram has already, helps the whole industry in this regard.”
Good luck to Tanner and Frost. Câv could prove to be one of the most important hospitality openings in London since the pandemic, where the wine lover and the Negroni fiend can wave white flags at each other from their respective trenches and, god willing, hug in the middle.