Lyaness is the flagship bar from the award-winning Mr Lyan and his team, set within the iconic Sea Containers London. Awarded World’s Best Bar & Best International Hotel Bar at Tales of Cocktail Spirited Award.

A floral style Americano that harks to the complexity of carrot flavours that can be developed when you apply some care – including pulling floral rather than earthy notes, or how we can ‘winter’ carrots to bring out their sweetness; a nod to how we often put a lot of efforts into preserving our fave flavours in the face of a difficult situation. From smuggling corned beef sandwiches into space, to Samuel Pepys burying wheels of Parmesan during the Great Fire of London, we’ve come up with great ways to keep hold of the flavours we love – even when faced with totally new situations.

Old Wives’ Tales often have some grounding, and if not, they can certainly generate a lot of nostalgia. There were heaps of examples born from food safety concerns becoming ceremonies – wasabi was thought to ward off any troublesome effects of raw fish, or for another fishy tale, the use of lemon juice to dissolve any wayward bones – until people realised it just made things more delicious. This cooling, aromatic & herbal julep showcases how anise can be way more nuanced than as a simple candy.

Ridiculous circumstances can create some of our favourite foods, and sometimes basic emotions – like spite – can play a role. Getting annoyed with a customer’s request for crispier potatoes, an inhospitable chef sliced them exxxtra thin and deep fried them – hoping to end a back-and-forth with an iron fist, but unexpectedly elicited much love, and the creation of crisps. Even pop culture can spur the (re)creation of something much loved as this very clean, aromatic vodka soda demonstrates; what it says on the tin!

We’re told not to play with our food, but like with this zesty and tropical sour, sometimes it’s just too damn fun. This was the origin of the frisbee; having snarfed the goodies from the local Bridgeport Frisbie Pie Co., 1940s Yale students would fling around the UFO-shaped tins, yelling ‘Frisbie’ to avoid any collisions with an unsuspecting passerby.

A fluffy tequila fizz that balances zestiness, nuttiness and tropical flavours, and celebrates transformed ingredients. A lesson of hubris by Meso-American colonists where they ignored indigenous knowledge and nutritional insight surrounding local crops, and notably, the practice of nixtamalization. As a result, many developed pellagra – and subsequently a pale, demented demeanour and an aversion to sunlight – and gave birth to the many myths and legends surrounding vampires.

Are we puppets guided by our microbiome, or are we in charge of our cravings? The dominance of these symbiotic creatures has come into more and more debate of late, with the eerie worry that we are less in control of our preferences than we might hope. But yet, we’re not just zombies chasing carbs and sugar – and what if these macro-nutrients could be way more? A weighty and rich, boozy, classic Martini, made in the most bonkers manner. Kinda the perfect exploration of the simplistic complexity that makes this drink so beguiling.

A stone fruit, rich swizzle underpinned by botanicals and the zestiness of Champagne. Why? Potatoes were seen as valueless (and poisonous!) despite them being hugely nutritious – even many years after their first trip across from South America – but with some ingenuity, a grower turned things around with one of the first PR stunts. By ‘protecting’ the crops with armed guards he made them seem like an extra-fancy resource. Of course, they were then stolen, eaten, and propagated all over the continent. Married with a host of other fancy goodness, we celebrate the richness a tattie can bring.

Old Mr Kellogg was not a great dude. And his prized, and most popular, creation was not born out of love – it was kinda the opposite. Cornflakes were created as a puritanical anti-masturbatory food (lol), yet the nutrition they provided to so many breakfast tables spurred a much more active lifestyle across the world. There’s a whole host of foods with problematic origins that thankfully get wrestled from their intended applications. A zesty, aromatic whiskey highball with a real strong nostalgia.

When we recontextualise foods, we lose a connection to something very close to us. Given that food is such a grounding connection for us all, when we shove nostalgic flavours into unrelated categories – hello Prosecco Candle! – we get things that feel strangely alien. This bright, lightly-bittersweet, gimlet explores the fun of language, and ‘adjacent’ flavours – without getting confected.

War tends to mess up a lot of things – well, kinda everything – and one of the first things to suffer is food, and joy is quick to follow. WW2 of course disrupted trade, and bananas – the UK’s favourite fruit, and the key to so many kids’ sandwiches – was one of the first to fall, so inventive parents used local parsnips to replicate the creamy richness, and supplemented it with flavourings to spark some joy back into a grim situation. We mirrored this in a fluffy sour, but looked to see how we could eke much more authentic tropical notes from the humble parsnip.

A complex, spiced, whisky sour(ish) with layers of
rich whisky – influenced by the unexpected pairing of Japanese ingredients, and the magically humble fried chicken. Sometimes food traditions find an unexpected footing and spread in their impact – despite not being a national holiday, on the 25th December it is traditional for Japanese families to gather round the table and celebrate the value of human connection – over a bucket of KFC – so successful, that the day now accounts for a third of annual sales.

Biomimicry makes a lot of sense; nature has had millions of permutations to test new designs, so why not copy this? Of course we use lots of animal products – shuttlecocks utilise goose feather to fly well, but only from the left wing else they spin the wrong way – but often nature’s hand is felt in ways of solving food dilemmas, or removing reliance on an animal intermediary as this rich, elegant hug demonstrates; how to get vanilla without orchid bees, or figs without parasitic wasps.

An Old Fashioned pulling the tropical creamy notes from some Irish single malt and nodding to one of the world’s oldest confectioneries – dating back some 4000 years. Made from boiling down the root sap of a herb native to European marshes (if you hadn’t guessed) and sweetening, they were originally the reserve of gods and royalty – but like with all hallowed food, they quickly become commonplace, with some key innovations to make them more widely available.