Created by head bartender Giulia Cuccurullo, bar manager Lorenza Pezzetta, and assistant bar manager Nikos Tachmazis, and the rest of the Artesian team, the menu of 16 cocktails focuses on ingredients that are important for the future of the planet.
On the new menu, Cuccurullo said it started around a year ago with Artesian Atelier. The workshop and guest bar series sees a leading bar team from the global cocktail scene, invited to take part in a private workshop in The Langham’s cookery school, Sauce.
“The collaboration with different bars and chefs makes everything a bit more interesting because you see how others work. When their focus is different from yours, you learn a lot more doing it together," said Cuccurullo.
“We wanted to have a chef focus and use single ingredients with every drink, as a chef does for plates. There is always something built around one ingredient and we wanted to have this connection between the chef and the bartending world, we don’t really do different things, just one is a solid and one is a liquid."
The new menu considers ingredients that will affect the planet’s future in the long run. Cuccurullo adds they’re “ingredients we should all start to focus on. Sip by sip we want to be moving towards a better future.”
The menu is designed in the style of a cookbook, with QR codes that link to the recipe of each drink, showing how to use those ingredients. “The recipe won’t be focused on the drink itself but instead how we use specific ingredients that are important for the future, in the drink. We want to give people inspiration about how to start to use those ingredients,” added Cuccurullo.
The bar’s food will be served as part of a collaboration with Humble Chicken. “We have this duality between the hotel service and the street food. You have fried chicken that goes really well with champagne, so we want people to feel like they’re having a five star experience but still having fun."
There will still be classics on the menu, with popular serves from previous menus being carried through to the new menu such as the Odi and the Sun cocktails.
One of the cocktails inspired by ingredients of the future is ‘Insects’, a take on the whisky sour which uses Michter’s bourbon, Campari, Nixta Corn Liqueur, crickets, chicatanas, coffee and lime, with a glass that changes colour as you drink, inspired by the insect skin.
Other ingredients that can be found throughout the menu include vegetables and fruits such as sweet potato, beetroot, mushroom, date, jackfruit and pea; plants and trees including amaranth, moringa, pandan and nopales; and unexpected elements such as the insects, spirulina, soil, tigernuts, kombu and water.
