Glass drinks the Savoy Songbook at the American Bar

THERE’S SOMETHING faintly disconcerting about seeing Jay-Z and the Foo Fighters namechecked in the American Bar’s new drinks menu. The Savoy is not necessarily the first establishment you associate with contemporary cultural reflections – its £220m refurbishment a decade ago was designed more to preserve the hotel’s Art Deco heritage in Grade II-listed aspic than to reimagine its gilded halls and corridors for a more modern era. The appeal of the American Bar has always been the chance to surreptitiously rub shoulders with the ghosts of patrons past – your Noël Cowards, Marlene Dietrichs, Ernest Hemingways and Marilyn Monroes. It’s easier to imagine Frank Sinatra propping up the bar here than Dave Grohl.

Moonlight Kiss cocktail. Photograph: Tristan Jakob-Hoff

Thank goodness then for resident pianist Jon Nickoll, whose buttery vocals and laidback fingerwork always give the place an air of Jazz Age respectability, even when his choice of covers strays from the Sinatra standards to embrace the likes of Kings of Leon or Amy Winehouse. In Nickoll’s easy-going arrangements, everything new is reassuringly old again. He has been tinkling these ivories for 15 years now, and the new menu – sorry, “Songbook” – is in large part a tribute to his many years of service.

Head bartender Maxim Schulte and director of bars Declan McGurk have worked with Nickoll and other resident musicians to deliver a drinks list that doubles as a compilation album of the Savoy’s greatest hits.

This is no mere gimmick – indeed, quite a lot of thought has been put into matching drinks with songs. For instance, the Concrete Jungle takes Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’s 2009 hit Empire State of Mind as its starting point, resulting in a twist on the classic New York Sour which swaps out bourbon for rye, tempering the latter’s spiciness with the Big Apple duo of Calvados and Apéritif de Normandie. The usual red wine float is mixed in here with a touch of rooibos, and the egg white dispensed with altogether – a nod to Keys’s veganism – but despite such minor heresies, it’s a lovely drink, refreshing and finely balanced with just a hint of tannic astringency in the finish.

 

The Concrete Jungle cocktail. Photograph: Tristan Jakob-Hoff

The Ghost King is a tribute to Marc Cohn’s Walking in Memphis, so inevitably touches down in the land of the Delta Blues with a shot of Jack Daniel’s. A hint of Branca Menta adds a light herbal note before making way for the drink’s real star – an Italian dessert wine called Visciolata, which contributes wave after lingering wave of caramel and cherry deliciousness. It’s dangerously drinkable. So too are the Sun, Sun, Sun, a tongue-tantalising yuzu sour with a subtly cooling dash of mint, and the Don’t Panic, which looks and tastes a bit like alcoholised Ribena. The Moonlight Kiss is an appealingly dark blend of aged rum and coffee, though such strong flavours tend to overwhelm more delicate notes of green apple and Dandelion & Burdock.

 

The Sun Sun Sun cocktail. Photograph: Ariffin Omar

The Breathless Charm, meanwhile, is difficult to describe without mentioning soap. We’re talking about some pretty fancy soap here, mind you – this has that intoxicating, highly perfumed aroma you might associated with the bathroom of a posh hotel or fancy restaurant. The menu lists vetiver, argan tincture and something called “Hystérie liqueur” amongst the drink’s ingredients, but whatever the case, it all adds up to a surprising – and surprisingly delicious – cocktail. My companion described it as tasting a bit like an Hermès model who’s just stepped out of the shower. I didn’t ask.

 

The Don’t Panic cocktail. Photograph: Ariffin Omar

Being the American Bar, of course, prices are deliriously excessive, even by hotel bar standards. This is not the sort of place to visit on a budget – the median cost of a drink from the new menu is £25. It will probably take a fair few of those before you feel sufficiently carefree to drop a full £50 on the Lonely Street, a coffee-and-smoke-infused Rob Roy variant that tastes like the burnt bits of a marshmallow that’s been cremated over a woodstove in the depths of a Scottish winter.

That’s absolutely meant as a recommendation, by the way, but you could equally just buy a return ticket to Glasgow and incinerate your own marshmallows if you wanted to save a few pounds.

by Tristan Jakob-Hoff

American Bar
The Savoy Hotel
100 Strand
London WC2R 0EZ