Dried fermented tuna, Buddha’s Hand citrus and a TCM-inspired Martinez headline a new city-wide cocktail festival running 22–28 June
A brand new festival starting today is asking Londoners to drink fermented tuna, sake lees and a citrus fruit with no juice in it. Are you up for the flavour rollercoaster?
If so, then Taste The Orient is for you. The cocktail festival starts today and runs until the 28 June across 45 participating venues. Here’s everything you need to know about it, including some of the most interesting bars and restaurants you can visit as part of the programme, as well as drink and food highlights.
What is Taste the Orient?
Taste The Orient is a new week-long cocktail festival running across London from 22 to 28 June. It’s organised by The Orientalist Spirits (an all-Asian spirits brand founded by Michel Lu) in partnership with the team behind London Cocktail Week – founders Hannah Sharman-Cox and Siobhán Payne.
The basic structure: 45 bars and restaurants across London each create a Signature Serve made exclusively for the festival. Some venues are also doing short menus, tasting flights, or food pairings. It’s built around Asian ingredients that rarely show up in Western cocktail bars. Think like Buddha’s Hand citrus, Korean Omija berries, sake kasu, shio koji, and katsuobushi (dried fermented tuna).
The venue list is a fabulously strange mix of the high-profile and the hard-to-find. Hakkasan Mayfair, Nobu, Sexy Fish and GONG Bar at Shangri-La The Shard sit alongside Opium, which operates behind an unmarked door in Chinatown, As Above So Below underneath a Stoke Newington barbershop, and 19FiftySeven, which bills itself as London’s first Malaysian speakeasy.
So, what’s to drink?
There are inventive cocktails aplenty, of course. We strongly recommend you check the Taste The Orient website and leisurely browse throughout the list of venues available. There, you’ll be able to dive into each place to find the Signature Serves and accompaniments on offer.
We got the inside scoop last week, having visited Archive & Myth, the Savoy-era-inspired bar tucked beneath the Hippodrome Casino in Leicester Square (and the 18th best bar in the UK) to try:
The Pickle Rickey (£16, paired with Salt & Pepper Prawns)
It takes The Orientalist Gunpowder Gin built from 23 botanicals and runs it against dill pickle brine, clarified Granny Smith apple juice and Midori. It’s a strange combination on paper that makes more sense once you remember pickle brine and gin have always got on. Delightfully refreshing.
The Rising Star Martini (£16, paired with Steamed Garlic Scallops)
This is a frozen reworking of the Pornstar Martini: The Orientalist Origins Vodka meets passion fruit and a milk oolong-infused vanilla syrup, topped with a torched meringue of toasted coconut and finished with yuzu kosho salt. A grown-up slushie-cum-lemon meringue pie that will blown your socks up.
Some of the other bars and Signature Serves
Archive & Myth can be stop number one, but the odyssey continues. Other options include:
Bar Lotus’s Martinez (£15) swaps the usual sweet vermouth for a house-made version steeped with traditional Chinese medicine botanicals
Lucy Wong in Fitzrovia has the Omija Tea Collins (£12), built on a honey-sweetened tea made from the Omija berry, a Korean ingredient that’s said to carry five flavours at once: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and spice. It’s paired with pork and prawn siu mai.
Opium Chinatown’s Citrus Ritual (£15) is a gin sour with yuzu and salted lemon cordial, finished tableside with grated Buddha’s Hand – a fingered citrus with no juice or pulp at all, valued purely for its oils.
Kioku by Endo at The OWO has gone the furthest with two kaiseki-inspired flights at £30 each: the Meadow includes a vodka serve made with katsuobushi (dried fermented skipjack tuna), white miso and jasmine, plus a separate pour with fig leaf, gorseflower and corn, while the Woodland moves through chanterelle, apricot, pine, Douglas fir, sloe and blackberry.
Sam Page, current World Bartender of the Year, has reworked the Negroni at Sexy Fish into a Pomelo Negroni (£10) – gin-forward, softened with pomelo cordial, finished with a shiso distillate and sous vide sansho peppercorns. His second £10 serve runs on wintermelon tea, a staple of Chinese and Southeast Asian cooking.
Hakkasan Mayfair is staying closer to its own classics with a Signature Dirty Martini and a Lychee Martini, both made with The Orientalist’s Origins Vodka and Gunpowder Gin.
At Lucky Cat, the Akai Ito pairs warming rum with earl grey tea syrup under a lychee foam, while Between The Moon mixes yuzu-infused Martini Ambrato with fig liqueur, salt and chocolate bitters.
How did Taste the Orient come about?
London Cocktail Week founders Hannah Sharman-Cox and Siobhán Payne point to a moment where the best bars across the city, not just the Asian ones, are already being shaped by Asian flavours and serves, and say they wanted a platform that shows the range of that hospitality – destination venues and neighbourhood spots given equal billing.
Orientalist Spirits founder Michel Lu built the brand on the idea that Asia’s drinks culture deserved its own dedicated spirits house, drawing on the continent’s flavours, crafts and traditions, and this festival is that pitch made tangible across a whole city rather than a single bar shelf.
Key details
Entry is free, with a printed festival guide available to collect at participating venues. Cocktails are charged individually. Full venue list and registration at tastetheorient.com.