Our latest menu spotlight falls on Cato's Synaesthesia. Hamish Smith reports.
To some – perhaps around 2-4% of us – numbers evoke colours, words summon tastes and colours give rise to textures. For Angelos Bafas, this bridging of the senses – synaesthesia as it’s referred to – has always been present in his life. At school he would remember days of the week by colours. As a bartender, he would subconsciously group flavours by colour.
At Cato, his new digs in Covent Garden – backed by restaurateurs Aiste Bart and Andrew Taylor and working alongside Bart & Taylor’s drinks development manager, Yaw Asante – the team have created a whole menu around these sensorial overlaps.
The 14 drinks are created to a colour profile – seven of them – with the two leading ingredients not only having the task of connoting colour but, once mingled together, exhibiting it visually too. It is one thing to create drinks that are thematically coherent – as most bars do with concept menus – quite another to create boundaries around colour.
“The enemy of art is the absence of limitations,” famously stated Orson Welles. He would have been a fan of this menu. Not only is each cocktail created to a colour, but the palette of paints is severely limited too.
Many bars have toyed with British-centric sourcing, few have gone full native. Downstairs at the main bar of Cato, there is not an ingredient from outside of Britain. To make life harder, at the time they were devising the drinks it was the middle of one of the most miserable winters these Isles can remember.
It’s amazing what can be grown under glass, or, if you think a little ahead, what ingredients can be picked at their peak and preserved by alcohol, sugar, vinegar or sub-zero temperatures.
Traditional approach
Bafas may have left his role at Nipperkin, but the severance has been gradual – and amicable – with some of the more esoteric bottles and jars of macerating potions finding their way to Cato. But let’s add one more limitation to the creative process – unlike a lot of new bars in London, there is no rotavap or centrifuge – pretty much nothing with a plug and fuse. Infusions are achieved in the traditional way – racking, filtering, time.
And as with all menus, entering the thinking is that the drinks should fit an array of vessel shapes and, where possible, they might have a faint trace of a classic, to offer a disoriented customer safe landing.
Take the Chamomile + Sweet Clover in the Yellow section of the menu – trace it back and it’s a Bee’s Knees. Alongside its two major ingredients – contorted in many ways – there’s English gin, Renais and house-made meadow vermouth. From the White section is a Sweet Woodruff + Cream, with Hendrick’s, woodruff, koji and butter cream, white liqueur and cultured cream.
British ingredients don’t always have to sound like they were foraged from Hobbiton: Jalapeno + Shiso are also grown here. The drink by the same name sees its headline green ingredients combined with Ramsbury vodka, green pea distillate, Schofield’s vermouth and gooseberry. It’s a Margarita in every aspect, except the entirety of its ingredients.
Channelling your inner synaesthesia, there’s the approachable pink drink: Forced Rhubarb + Apple Blossom and, if you’re feeling medieval, from the Brown section, there is Medlar + Mushroom. Down here in the main bar at Cato is a fine example of a thematic menu that revels within its self-imposed boundaries.
But if you’re less in the mood for an Elderflower + Cheese Martini and fancy something a little easier on the mind, if not the palate, upstairs is the House of Julep, named after American bartender Cato Alexander’s favourite drink. It’s more of a New York Tavern-style bar – and you’re in for a real treat.
There are Juleps and Smashes aplenty, but also some British-ingredient twists on all your favourite North American classics. The Mustard Sour, the Rhubarb Paloma, the Apple + Gooseberry Daiquiri and the Cheesecake Clover Club – more bangers than a firework display.
Drinks so good you should, but understandably might not, make it downstairs.