Cyndi Himmelstiere reviews the pop-up bar takeover of Bedford Square Gardens and one drink in particular that required real commitment
Bedford Square Gardens is usually locked to the public, which made walking straight in for Cocktails in the City feel slightly illicit, like I’d been handed a key I hadn’t earned. Twenty of London’s best bars had set up inside, and I went in with a plan to try five drinks responsibly. That plan lasted roughly forty minutes.
The Token System
You buy tokens, exchange them for drinks, and the entire arithmetic of the evening collapses somewhere around your fourth cocktail, at which point you simply hand tokens to bartenders on faith and hope the maths sorts itself out eventually.
The Drink That Actually Broke Me
One bar served a cocktail under an actual glass dome filled with smoke, theatrically lifted at the table, and I want to be clear this was extraordinary as a spectacle and considerably more work than I expected from a single drink. You are, essentially, performing a small ceremony before you’re even allowed to sip anything.
Whether It Was Worth The Performance
Genuinely, yes. The smoke wasn’t just for show, it had actually infused the drink itself with a depth that a normal cocktail simply doesn’t have, though I will say the whole experience required more patience than I usually bring to a Tuesday evening drink.
The Milk Punch Situation
Another stall had done something clever with clarified milk punch, silky in a way that felt completely at odds with how it’s actually made, and I spent a genuinely embarrassing amount of time trying to get the bartender to explain the process to me in more technical detail than either of us really had time for.
How I Felt The Next Morning
Not brilliant, largely thanks to the smoked cocktail, though I stand by every single decision that led to that particular hangover. Bedford Square Gardens does not care about your Wednesday. It only cares that you had a properly good time on the Tuesday, and I genuinely did.
Would I Go Back
In a heartbeat, and I’ve already worked out which bars I missed this year so I can hit them next time the gardens open up to the rest of us mortals again.