Cocktails to go are upping dinner party spirits

Mix and dash
Frankie McCoy27 September 2018

So here’s a fun idea.

Next time you generously agree to host a dinner party for your best and booziest of friends, how about you shelve the fizz or wine and kick it off with some freshly made, cleverly crafted cocktails to get everyone suitably riotous? ‘But I’m a terrible bartender!’ you cry. ‘Last time I tried to make cocktails we ended up drinking warm gin with UHT orange juice.’

You need to outsource. Specifically, you need new Fitzrovia bar and bottle shop Genuine Liquorette, named after the hip New York bar which inspired its Cha-Chunker cocktails (miniature bottles of spirit upended into cans of soft drink, with some extra wizardry added to create some very clever cocktails indeed) upstairs. But it’s the downstairs bottle shop that you’ll need pre-dinner party. Because here we have London’s first cocktail deli, where you can have a bartender blend fresh juices, bitters, liqueurs and spirits to create up to six servings of your custom cocktail (from £10 per person). Think of it as a booze version of Ottolenghi.

‘Say you’ve got a dinner party going on this evening, there’s six of you and you need an aperitif and a digestif. You like gin and a couple of people like tequila,’ explains general manager Matt Roberts. ‘All the drinks are broken down into boozy, juicy and fizzy. Whichever option you choose dictates the “journey” you’ll be taken through.’

Under the bartender’s guidance you can go all George’s Marvellous Medicine on your own special brew, which is then poured into a bottle that doubles as a cocktail shaker. You also get vacuum-packed garnishes and a recipe card, plus info on allergens and ABV.

In a rush? There are six taps of readymade ‘All Star’ cocktails from which to fill a takeaway bottle, including a herbaceous, celery-spiked Gimlet (‘quaffable and bracing’, says Roberts). It will be collaborating with other London bars to create a ‘compass’ of the city’s best drinks on tap. And if you’re local, you can even get them delivered.

Pre-made cocktails aren’t new, but there are some dire options out there. As Roberts puts it: ‘It’s always a category of 10 drinks that have been dumbed down for the consumer.’ An exception to the rule is Longflint Drinks Co., which collaborates with local spirit-makers such as East London Liquor Company on its gorgeous bottles of pre-made Negroni Sbagliato and grapefruit, sour cherry and mezcal Palomas.

And if you’ve got multiple spirit bottles knocking around but can’t be bothered with the faff of recipes, try Tipplesworth: pre-made espresso Martinis and Garden Collins to which you simply add a slug of vodka or gin. Be prepared: dinner parties just got that bit more spirited.

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