Hamish Smith was in Bengaluru, India, to visit one of Asia’s Best Bars – ZLB23.
Never underestimate the magic of a hidden bar. The uncertainty of that hard-to-find entrance harnesses anticipation; the scene change that follows is one of the great thematic tricks of the concept bar. Few do it better than ZLB23.
Set in the heart of the bustling metropolis that is Bengaluru (Bangalore), the Leela Palace hotel’s pink sandstone edifice, wreathed in lush gardens and cascading waterfalls, couldn’t be more juxtaposed to the surrounding city. Down a winding garden path in its grounds, you’ll find a door, through which is a kitchen where hot pots steam and chefs go about their work. Then to a service lift and the transportation is complete. You left one of India’s thronging megacities and now you’re in Kyoto in the 1920s. Replete with red, velvet curtains, gleaming chandeliers and lively jazz band, this is the city’s first themed speakeasy.
At the bar you may well find manager and drinksmith Rajiv Mukherjee, whose cocktails are structurally classic but have a Japanese spin – more on that later. The bar food, meanwhile, is an invitation to stay where you are for the whole evening – in spite of the Leela’s many venues. Among ZLB23’s restaurant-level dishes, try the hickory-smoked duck.
But orchestrating it all is the venue’s operations manager, Suchismita Roy Chowdhury, who I caught up with at the bar at ZLB23.
You’ve been at ZLB23 since it opened in early 2023 – tell us about the concept…
We wanted to create an altogether different experience for our guests and we came up with the idea of a five-star hotel speakeasy – the first in India and the first speakeasy in Bengaluru. The space was formerly part of our East Asian restaurant Zen, so we wanted to do something in keeping with that and Japan is the country most associated with bartending – the traditions and precision it applies to drinks making is very inspiring. So, we came up with this idea of a fictional character – a Japanese warrior, Zia, who is our link to Prohibition-era Kyoto. So ZLB stands for Zia’s Lounge Bar and 23 is the number in our address.
How’s the response been more widely?
Initially there were challenges around our customers understanding what a speakeasy is – we didn’t have any geo-tagging and it was all word of mouth – but after three months it really picked up. Now it’s gone way beyond our expectations. In 2024 we made the Asia’s 50 Best Bars list – the only bar from India, finishing at number 40, and this year we moved up to no.31. The response was really surprising. Now there are people from outside India travelling here to visit. There have been guests who have come straight from the airport just to enjoy a drink here and some who are visiting all of Asia’s 50 Best Bars. Now 70% of our guests are non-residents.
Tell us what you’ve done with the drinks
In the first section of the menu we take Prohibition-era cocktails and give them a Japanese twist – so cocktails such as the Tokyo Bee’s Knees is made with gin, butterfly pea tea, lavender, ginger and honey. The next section is dedicated to Japanese-influenced classics. For the Japanese Old Fashioned we use oak wood to smoke under a cloche, fennel extract and kokuto black sugar from Okinawa. That was hard to source, but where there’s a will there’s a way. We’re on our third menu but we couldn’t take the Old Fashioned off. It’s the same for the Shoyu Ramen – tequila, sake, shiro miso and shochu – which is savoury and also a favourite with our guests.
Annanas and Fire & Water
And the latest menu also sees more Indian flavours enter the repertoire?
Since we’ve been travelling out of India for bar takeovers, we realised we should also show some of what India has to offer in our cocktails. So, on our second anniversary we launched our third menu with a section on local ingredients and flavours. It’s called Native and it’s been doing great – the team here are very creative. Bengaluru is famous for its pineapples so we have drinks such as Annanas (rum, vanilla liqueur, pineapple, pandan and almond). Another is One in a Melon, using our local watermelon, mezcal, feta and basil. My favourite is Fire & Water, which is a Martini with local pickled chilli, gin, Malfi Limone, sake, Lillet Blanc and edamame. We also have Whisky Highballs – the Coco Irish Fizz, with Irish whiskey, coconut water, ginger and key lime leaf, which we grow in the hotel. We have our own herb garden here and a small nursery where we are growing trees such as fig and lime. You can’t get more local than that.