The Bar Review #3 OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE NEW!
When MIT meets Stranger Things, sprinkled with a bit of The NeverEnding Story. That’s how 2026 feels to me.
I came to believe that innovation does not require a specific environment if it wants to get out in the world….it needs only an open mind. Too often we feel the need to enter a bar that looks like an overcrowded chemical laboratory, to interpret that’s real innovation. But sometimes innovation is quiet. Less noise, more intention. Less spectacle, more intrinsic logic behind the liquid. This is my second year returning to Lyaness. A bar perched above the Thames, at the first floor of a hotel, where the people and the menu take center stage.
The first question by the barkeeper you’re met with when entering the bar: „Why did you come here?“
Many guests are simply asking for a good old G&T or a peaty whisky, and that’s perfectly fine …but others, like me, hid in the obscure light of the room, having come for the unapologetic geekiness of the menu.
And even in that soft shadow, when you give that answer to the „drink concierge“, you can see how his eyes begin to sparkle.
The menu has two parts – the gorgeous classics and a portfolio of original cocktails starting from an ingredient which usually blows your mind. Let’s take a first example:
“Reverse time-travel flower vermouth – by hand rolling the fresh daisies, we rupture the cells and allow a controlled oxidation & fermentation to take these delicate flowers on a path from bright white to deep purple. We reversed our time travel series – going slow to harness fast – opening out a different floral aspect to accent into vermouth”
So….my journey starts from there, from the intriguing complexity of the ingredient. I usually have few drinks and listen religiously to our waiter, who becomes the curator of the journey. To choose 5 drinks I tasted 6 ingredients this time:
Places like Lyaness make you doubt that you understand how the process of fermentation works or how the infusion of a liquid function. They create a playground which even if it starts with: “this ingredient is processed to get this outcome”, the path from A to B is not linear. It is the science of an ingredient you’d never expect to meet in a glass, wrapped in a story rich enough to make that science feel inevitable — even irresistible.
Because, honestly, if someone simply told you your cocktail was made with mould… would you drink it? At Lyaness, this provocation becomes part of the magic. Every organic, edible element is reimagined and woven into a contemporary fairytale.
That’s how the bar creations drift into the futuristic. To give you another example, the ingredient “paperback kombucha”: a cherry wood infested by “fungal networks”, extracting the one molecule which smells like raspberry, further provided as food to a kombucha – the end liquid having flavours of old libraries transformed into a digital love. And it’s delicious. The taste does not fail the story; the story does not overcome the joy of sipping.
The bar experience is not complete without the waiter. Each tasting, each new cocktail is prefaced by a dialogue with him. He stays with you at the table and explains vividly the mad game behind the molecules in your glass.
Atsushi Sour was my favourite cocktail by far. The ingredient: brainless melon curacao. That was wicked, mate! A fluffy classic gin White Lady “fixed” by allowing penicillium to transform melon in a very “Japanese way”. Let’s explain.
In year 2010 researchers, led by Toshiyuki Nakagaki at Hokkaido University, arranged 36 bits of food (oats) in a pattern corresponding to the cities around Tokyo. They placed a “brainless” slime-mold (Physarum Policephalum) at the spot representing Tokyo and allowed it to grow.
The slime mold created a network of tubes to reach the food sources, and the final pattern was a simplified but strikingly similar version of the actual Tokyo railway system. A demonstration of how using biological principles can improve design in the future.
Inspired by this experiment of Japanese engineering, Lyaness created a nerdy cocktail on a base of aromatic gin with sudachi citrus, perfect play for the bittersweet “brainless” penicillium mold melon ingredient. Fluffy but vibrant slowly moving at the second sip towards a tropical range due to the moscat wine. Delicious!
Over time Lyaness menus grew in nerdiness and storytelling, but every time, they nailed the trends. So what will 2026 mixology be about: building blocks, drama and magic. Science which holds your breath with an educated-shocked “wow”. Blocks, sometimes weird and funky, layered to tell the story and make you dream. The real luxury of a drink will finally not lie in lavish or constructed spaces; it will only require an open mind and a glass.
Cheers mates! Out with the old, in with the new!
Lyaness is on the list of 50 Best Bars in 2024.
#drinkresponsibly Until next time, Silvia Iacobescu
