There is nothing more special about your bar than where it’s from, says Dereece Gardner of Desire cocktail bar in Stoke-on-Trent.

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Across the UK, the technical standard of drinks is higher than ever. Education within the industry is strong, knowledge runs deep and consistency is no longer a limitation. Everyone wants to explore, improve and create something unique – and that’s something worth celebrating.

But as the industry has professionalised, it’s also become increasingly uniform. Walk into enough good bars in different cities and menus can begin to feel interchangeable.

That raises a question I find myself asking more often: how do bars differentiate without chasing novelty? And, more importantly, how can drinks help you understand where you are in the world? It often feels like bars now sit on one of two sides: classic-focused or contemporary and experimental.

Both approaches have pushed standards forward, but increasingly, I struggle to walk into a bar and immediately feel a sense of place. The drinks may be excellent, but local identity can be hard to find. As professionalism has grown, the language of cocktails has become more universal and in the process, character and context can get lost. When I travel, I’m not just interested in how skilled a bar is – within the industry we can all recognise quality.

What excites me is when a drink tells me something about the city I’m in, what people eat, what flavours they grew up with, and what that place is actually known for. As cocktail culture becomes more global, there’s a risk the sense of place gets smoothed out in favour of something that feels safe everywhere.

I was reminded of this a few years ago while travelling in Santorini. Olives weren’t something I’d ever particularly gravitated towards, but there they were everywhere – offered on arrival at hotels, placed on tables before meals, quietly woven into the rhythm of daily hospitality. I’m not suggesting for a second that this is unique to Greece, or that I’ve travelled the world cataloguing how every culture expresses itself through food and drink. But for me, that was the thing Santorini did. It was consistent, unforced and impossible to separate from the place itself. Even now, olives immediately take me back there.

Sense of character

I’ve noticed a similar clarity when travelling in Scotland. It’s a place I often find myself taking inspiration from, simply because of how fluently heritage and sense of place are expressed. Walk into bars across the country and you’re rarely left wondering where you are.

Familiar flavours such as Irn-Bru, Scotch whisky, shortbread and other everyday references quietly shape menus without needing explanation. In the bars I’ve visited, there’s a confidence in that identity. Such a bar feels like a place that understands its own character and allows it to translate naturally through drinks, rather than treating locality as something that needs to be invented.

Staffordshire – and Stoke, where I’m based – has a strong and unapologetic identity. Stokies are loud and proud, and the region is known for a few specific things: ceramics, mining and oatcakes. As the team at Desire became more involved in research and menu development, the question I kept coming back to was simple: what is the story, and where is the meaning behind the drink?

When we started thinking about how local culture could show up in the menu, it wasn’t about being clever. It was about asking which of these things could be translated into a drink in a way that felt honest and accessible. For us, the answer was oatcakes. A Staffordshire oatcake sits somewhere between a crêpe and a flatbread: soft, savoury and made from oats and yeast. It’s typically eaten warm with fillings such as bacon and melted cheese, and it is everyday food here rather than a nostalgic reference.

The Staffordshire Oatcake Martini was born with Belvedere vodka fat-washed with locally sourced reserva cheese, smoked saline, dry vermouth and tomato oil as a garnish. A toasted oatcake is pinned to the side of the glass, and the cocktail is poured straight from the freezer.

The Martini’s heritage is respected while bringing in classic Staffordshire culture. This isn’t about reinventing a local dish or turning it into a gimmick. It’s about flavour, memory and familiarity. The feeling of a Saturday morning when you wake up wanting a bacon and cheese oatcake to start the day.

It only makes sense here, and that’s the point. You won’t find this drink anywhere else in the world because it belongs to this place.

For visitors from outside the city, it gives a clear reference point that sits outside the norm. What matters is that this approach isn’t driven by technical showmanship or obscure ingredients. Everyone behind the bar grew up with these flavours, so the storytelling comes naturally.

The team can explain the drink confidently and genuinely believe in it. That shared understanding is just as important as the liquid itself. As drinks programmers, owners and managers, we have an opportunity. The universal cocktail language has value, but it shouldn’t be the only one we speak. Leaning into what a city is genuinely known for, often through food, allows drinks to carry memory, identity and emotion in a way people instinctively understand. This isn’t an argument for nostalgia or forcing local references onto every menu.

Not every drink needs to be rooted in place. But allowing space for a local voice helps anchor a bar to its surroundings. As the industry continues to grow, the challenge isn’t raising standards it’s preserving character. If cocktails can help tell the story of where they’re made, they can do more than just taste good – they can help bars sound like themselves.