The Connaught Bar opens at four in the afternoon. For most of its years, the early hours were the quiet hours — the room would fill slowly through five and six and only reach capacity at seven, with the last seating of the night running close to eleven. Since the room first claimed the top of the World’s 50 Best Bars list, the pattern has compressed. By six the bar is full. By six-thirty it is at capacity and the host at the door is starting to turn walk-ins away. The thing to do, accordingly, is to arrive at quarter to.
This is a dispatch from one such arrival, on a January Wednesday in Mayfair.
The walk over
I had come from a meeting in St James and walked across Berkeley Square to Carlos Place. The Connaught is at the top of the place — a corner building in Portland stone with a small porte-cochere, a topiary courtyard out front with a Tadao Ando water feature at its center, and a doorman in a black overcoat at the entrance who knows the regulars by name and asks the rest who they are seeing. I told him the bar. He pointed left through the lobby and said, in the slight house understatement that the Connaught staff still do well, that I might want to be quick.
The lobby of the Connaught is a small room — dark wood paneling, a single floral arrangement on the central table, a fireplace lit in winter. The Connaught Bar entrance is off the lobby to the left, through a pair of mirrored doors. The host at the door, a young woman in the bar’s black uniform, took my name, found me on the list, and walked me to a small two-top against the back wall.
The room at five-forty-five
The Connaught Bar is a long, narrow room — perhaps fifteen meters by seven — in a deep blue-grey color palette that the designer David Collins set in 2008 and that has been preserved by his studio since his death. The walls are upholstered in a textured silver leather. The bar itself runs along one long wall, with mirrored shelving behind it; the seating is a mix of low banquettes and small round tables, with a few stools at the bar. The room is dimly lit. The lighting works.
At quarter to six the room was perhaps two-thirds full. The patron mix on a January weekday was, as best I could read it, half hotel guests, a quarter London regulars, and a quarter visitors who had booked weeks ahead. Two couples in evening dress at the corner banquette — pre-theatre, almost certainly. A group of four men at the long banquette in suits — a business dinner about to start, given the way the bottle of Krug was sitting in the bucket. A solo woman at the bar in a black cocktail dress, reading a book with the room’s lamp turned to her shoulder.
The bar music — the Connaught keeps a curated jazz program at low volume — was at a level where you could hear conversation at your own table and not at the next one.
The trolley
The bar’s signature drink is the Connaught Martini, which is constructed at the table from a wheeled trolley. The trolley itself is the room’s set piece. A black-lacquered cabinet on small caster wheels with a brass top, designed by the London studio Inkorporate for the bar’s 2008 opening and updated cosmetically since but mechanically unchanged. On the trolley: a thin chilled stainless mixing pitcher with the Connaught crest etched at the lip, two crystal glasses (the second is for the dilution test the bartender does before serving), a small carafe of London dry gin that the bar has bottled exclusively for them, a carafe of dry vermouth, a row of small glass vials of the bar’s handmade bitters, and a hand-cut block of ice.
The bitters are the trick. There are five house bitters on the trolley: lavender, tonka bean, cardamom, ginseng-bergamot (“Dr Ago”, named for Agostino Perrone), and grapefruit-coriander. The bartender presents the vials at the table, talks the guest through the profile of each, and invites the guest to select one — or to ask for the house combination, which is Perrone’s original recipe.
I ordered the Connaught Martini, asked for the Dr Ago bitters, and watched the construction. The bartender — a young Italian man whose name tag read Mattia — pulled the trolley to the side of the table, set out a single chilled crystal glass, and began.
The construction
The construction takes about four minutes and is theatrical in a quiet way. Mattia first chilled the mixing pitcher with a single ice cube turned in the stainless. He poured the cube out into a small dish below the trolley. He added a measure of the house gin from the carafe, then a smaller measure of the dry vermouth — by eye, not by jigger, which is the bar’s house style and one of the small ways the program signals confidence. He stirred for a count of perhaps twenty seconds with a long bar spoon.
The bitters came next. He took the Dr Ago vial — a small clear-glass dropper bottle with a hand-typed label — and added two drops to the surface of the cocktail. He stirred for another five seconds. He poured the cocktail through a strainer into the chilled crystal glass.
The garnish is the move that makes the drink. He took a long strip of lemon peel cut at the bar earlier, expressed it over the surface of the glass — you could see the oil mist hit the surface in the bar light — and dropped the peel in. He then, in the small final flourish that the regulars come back for, set the glass down at the table and stepped back without saying anything. The drink presents itself.
The drink
The Connaught Martini is colder than most martinis you will get in London. The mixing pitcher is kept in the bar’s chest freezer between orders; the dilution is consequently lower; the temperature on the glass is below the typical bar-spoon martini by perhaps three or four degrees. The aromatics of the Dr Ago bitters sit on top — the bergamot first, the ginseng underneath — and the gin’s botanicals come through the back.
I drank the first sip slowly. The bar’s house move is to wait by the table until the first sip is taken; Mattia did so, watched the response, and then left for the next table without a word.
The room at six-fifteen
The room had filled while I was drinking. Every banquette was occupied. Three tables were stacked two deep at the front near the door. The bar host was politely turning away the latest walk-ins; the line at the door was four parties deep. The noise level in the room had risen from background to active, but not loud — the bar’s acoustic treatment, which the David Collins Studio designed with some care, keeps the sound at conversational volume even at capacity.
A pianist had taken the seat at the small upright piano at the back of the room. The jazz had given way to a live program — slow standards, played at low volume, without vocals. The bar program at the Connaught is the kind of thing the hotel does well: live, but quiet, and never the focus of the room.
What the bar is doing
The Connaught Bar’s signature trick — the trolley, the bitters, the construction at the table — is a piece of theatre. Most bars at the top of the World’s 50 Best list rely on either ingredient theatre (the rare spirits, the molecular techniques) or atmosphere theatre (the room, the lighting, the music). The Connaught does ingredient theatre at the table. The trolley is a small piece of stagecraft that converts a five-minute drink construction from invisible bar work into an event for the table that ordered it. The bitters selection makes the guest a participant in the drink rather than a recipient of it.
That is the room’s lasting contribution to the modern bar industry. The trolley is now copied across the world — the Aman bars, the Four Seasons bars, the Ritz Paris — but the original at the Connaught remains the cleanest expression. Agostino Perrone is no longer behind the bar most nights, but the team he trained runs the room with the same calibration he set in 2008.
I finished the martini at quarter past six, paid the bill, and walked back out through the lobby into the Mayfair winter dark. The doorman nodded. The walk back across Berkeley Square was the right walk to take after a Connaught Martini, which is the small additional gift the bar gives the regulars: it leaves you in a state to walk.
Standing Questions
- Where is the Connaught Bar?
- The Connaught Bar is inside The Connaught hotel on Carlos Place in Mayfair, London. It is the principal cocktail bar of the property, separate from the adjacent Red Room. Entry is through the hotel's main lobby.
- Who designed the martini trolley?
- The black-lacquered Art Deco martini trolley was designed by Inkorporate, the London studio brought in when the bar was opened in 2008. The trolley carries the bar's signature collection of handmade bitters and is wheeled to the table for each Connaught Martini order.
- Who runs the bar program?
- Agostino Perrone — originally from Lake Como — joined the property in 2008 and has run the bar program since. He was named International Best Bartender of the Year at the 2010 Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards and European Mixologist of the Year in 2017.
- Does the bar take reservations?
- The Connaught Bar takes a limited number of reservations for the first seating; walk-in availability is increasingly difficult after 6:30pm. Booking through the hotel concierge or directly via The Connaught website is recommended.
