White Lyan: the bar with no ice, no fruit and no brands

Richard Godwin drops in on two Hoxton bartenders trying to break the mould
10 October 2013

Something was missing. I sensed it as soon as I entered White Lyan. The space is neatly black and white, the soundtrack discreetly tasteful, the clientele well-dressed Hoxtonites.

“There’s no taxidermy!” I cried as I settled at the bar. A 2009 Hackney council by-law made this mandatory for liquor licences. “Ah, well,” said Australian barkeep Iain Griffiths as he poured a glass of water, with signature White Lyan mineral content. “We kind of thought that had been done enough.”

There are no branded spirits or mixers, just fridges and freezers containing pre-batched drinks. There is no ice. No fruits.

Griffiths and his business partner, Ryan Chetiyawardana, who recently tended the bar at 69 Colebrooke Row and the Worship Street Whistling Shop, have decided to rewrite the rule book. “Lemons and limes vary from batch by batch,” says Chetiyawardana. “Some have more juice, some are sweeter, some sourer.”

He and Griffiths use vinegars, distillates, shrubs and cordials to sour the drinks rather than citrus fruit. Likewise, refrigerating the drinks and diluting them with their own water means they can control temperature and strength accurately. Spirits are sourced direct from the distilleries and doctored on site. You will not be able to opt for a JD and Coke (though there is a tiny selection of off-menu vintage bottles if you ask nicely).

Broadly speaking, there have been three overlapping bar trends in recent years: the scientific, the historical and the geographical. The first stresses method and molecules, liquid nitrogen, intravenous maraschino, centrifugal gin and so on. The second is obsessed with provenance: bourbon sourced from 1872, a gimlet recipe from Nelson’s cabin boy, ideally with moustaches, badgers and Minnie the Moocher on the gramophone. The third plays on authenticity of place, recreations of Mexican tequileira or French Quarter whorehouses.

Chetiyawardana stressed, as he poured me a Bone Martini — vodka, bone tincture (made by dissolving chicken bones in phosphoric acid) and lemon distillate — that there is a logic behind the minimalism. Usually it takes a bartender about five minutes to stir a martini. This took all of 20 seconds. The bone, by the way, just added a very subtle savoury note.

As Chetiyawardana told another customer: “Everything’s got a fair amount of machinery behind it.” The team spends all day bottling, batching and mixing drinks so that come the evening, all they have to do is open bottles, “finish” the drinks and chat to customers. It also means less waste.

As for the drinks, the Beeswax Old Fashioned was Scotch sweetened with honey poured out of a bottle lined with beeswax. The Moby Dick Sazerac included ambergris, extracted from the bile ducts of sperm whales and prized as a fixative in perfume — it made the after-taste endure for ages. Best was the Baby Bias: fino sherry and apricot soda with notes of vanilla and olive. Meanwhile, a girl at the bar ordered a Bay Cosmo, pre-bottled and flavoured with bay leaf, and her date pondered the Painted Presidente, in which the grenadine is painted on.

The concept runs through to the beer and wine — there’s only one kind of each, though you can add “oak distillate” or “hop distillation”. There are shooters for £3 a pop, the sort you’d expect in a Clapham branch of B@1. The concept is just an elegant way of letting people have fun. Early evening conversations can go uninterrupted; there will be bands and DJs downstairs; Griffiths says he wants to see people dancing on the furniture. It could catch on.

White Lyan, 153 Hoxton Street, N1 (020 3011 1153, whitelyan.com).

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