A new week-long cocktail festival is coming to London from 22nd to 28th June, built around rare and remarkable Asian flavours, culture and craft. Taste The Orient is a city-wide event from The Orientalist Spirits and the team behind London Cocktail Week, bringing together 45 of the capital’s best Asian bars.
Each venue has created a bespoke Signature Serve, exclusively priced and only available during the festival week. At Sexy Fish, current Bartender of the Year Sam Page has created two Signature Serves at £10 each: one using shiso distilled rather than muddled with sansho peppercorns sous vide, the other built around wintermelon tea, a prized ingredient in Chinese and Southeast Asian cuisine that almost never appears in Western cocktail bars.
London’s bar scene has spent years looking east for inspiration, but all too often pares down the complexity of those flavours to suit Western palates. Taste The Orient invites festival-goers to experience the continent’s exceptional ingredients, distinctive flavours and emerging cocktail trends – from dried fermented tuna and fresh mangosteen to Buddha’s Hand grated tableside and sake kasu, the pressed lees from sake production.
Five cocktail highlights from the festival include:
Martinez, Bar Lotus, Kingsland Road. £15. Following the TCM cocktail trend sweeping Asia, Bar Lotus has made a house vermouth taking traditional Chinese medicinal botanicals from the apothecary to the bar and used it in a reworked Martinez. Herbal, complex and rooted in centuries of Eastern flavour tradition.
Meadow and Woodland flights, Kioku by Endo at The OWO. £30 per flight. Two three-drink kaiseki-inspired flights built around the Japanese principle of capturing ingredients at their seasonal peak. The Meadow flight includes a serve with a very unusual ingredient – katsuobushi (dried fermented skipjack tuna) with white miso and jasmine, as well as a vodka cocktail with fig leaf, gorseflower and corn. The Woodland flight moves through chanterelle, apricot, pine, Douglas fir, sloe and blackberry.
Omija Tea Collins, Lucy Wong, Fitzrovia. £12. A gin cocktail built on a house-made honey-sweetened tea using the Omija berry, a Korean botanical with five simultaneous flavours in a single ingredient: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and spice. Paired with pork and prawn siu mai.
Citrus Ritual, Opium Chinatown. £15. A gin sour with yuzu and salted lemon cordial, elevated tableside with freshly grated Buddha’s Hand. This rare Chinese citrus has no juice or pulp and is prized entirely for its fragrant oils, which are intense and floral in a way that has no real equivalent in Western cooking.
Pomelo Negroni, Sam Page, Sexy Fish. £10. Created by current bartender of the year Sam Page from Sexy Fish, the classic Negroni structure has been changed to make the drink more gin forward, with pomelo cordial included to make the drink more approachable and shiso distillate providing a clean & aromatic top note. The whole cocktail is batched and sous vide with toasted sansho peppercorns to harmonise the flavours and give citrussy and peppery complexity.
This is only a small selection of what’s on offer. Alongside cult favourites and celebrated destinations like GONG Bar at Shangri-La The Shard, Hakkasan Mayfair and Nobu, the festival includes a number of the capital’s hidden gems including Opium, hidden behind an unmarked Chinatown door, The Listening Room at Moi in Soho, Bar Lotus on Kingsland Road, As Above So Below beneath a Stoke Newington barbershop (open just three nights a week) and 19FiftySeven, London’s first Malaysian speakeasy.
A full line-up of participating venues and festival experiences and registration for the free Festival Guide is now open at tastetheorient.com.
