Pick Your Night Before You Book Your Table
Ryan Chetiyawardana's Shoreditch basement bar splits into two venues depending on the day. Choose Wednesday for the drinks, Saturday for the vinyl, and understand which one you're walking into.
Down a staircase in the basement of One Hundred Shoreditch, past the hotel lobby that most guests never leave, burnt orange banquettes curve under '60s dome lighting and vinyl covers line the walls like a serious collector's living room. This is where Ryan Chetiyawardana — Mr Lyan of White Lyan, Dandelyan, Lyaness, and a shelf of industry awards including World's Best Bar 2018 — set up shop after returning east.
The pitch is a lo-fi, analogue cocktail programme in a room that shifts personality by the day. Midweek it's a conversation bar with some of the best drinks in E1. From Friday night onward, the DJ takes over and the decibels climb into club territory. Both versions work. They are not the same bar, and choosing between them is the whole game.
The drinks are best-in-Shoreditch, but the bar you get depends entirely on which night of the week you pick.
Editorial Deep
The menu rotates often enough that the drink you looked up online may not be there when you arrive — the list on the website is a sample, not a promise. What stays consistent is the approach: ingredient-forward, technically deep, and built around fermentation, cultured creams, and unusual pairings that read strange on paper and land clean in the glass.
The entrance is the giveaway. One Hundred Shoreditch's ground floor reads as a lobby bar for hotel guests, and most of them stop there. Seed Library is downstairs, and the descent is deliberately unmarked enough that you feel like you've found something rather than been directed to it.
Midweek is the drinkers — bar-industry people, hotel guests who did their homework, the small pool of Shoreditch locals who know a Mr Lyan room when they're standing in one. It's a crowd that talks about what's in the glass. Weekends are a different room entirely: younger, louder, dressed for the DJ rather than the drink, and the conversation-bar civility of Wednesday gives way to shoulder-to-shoulder by 11pm. The bar is 18+ and reads it, but the weekend energy is closer to a club than to a cocktail lounge.
The Banana Butter Swizzle at £15 is a defensible number. It uses a cultured cream that most bars won't attempt, it's built on a technique-heavy base, and it drinks like a drink you cannot get in another Shoreditch room. That puts Seed Library above the neighbourhood mean and below the palace-bar tier, which is where a Mr Lyan programme should sit. The Sofrito Spritz at £16 is the one price to question — a spritz format asks you to trust the ingredient work, and if you're not sold on white carrot and yellow bell pepper wine as a category, the number will sting.
Come Wednesday or Thursday and this is one of the better cocktail nights in East London — quiet enough to talk, serious enough to order the strange one. Come Friday or Saturday and it becomes a music room with excellent drinks, which is a different product and one the vinyl-set crowd from Diggers Dozen and Love Vinyl earns. The version to avoid: booking a table for a first date on a Saturday night expecting the Wednesday bar. Pick the night before you pick the bar.
Order this
Drink this.
Banana Butter Swizzle (£15) — Jack Daniel's, pineapple, banana cultured cream, fino, lime
“Best-in-class Shoreditch cocktails from a Mr Lyan basement — but pick your night carefully.”
A serious modern cocktail programme in a room that changes character by the day. Go Wednesday or Thursday for the drinks and the conversation. Go Friday or Saturday only if you want the DJ set as part of the deal. Skip if you're expecting the palace-bar hush of Connaught or the martini precision of Tayēr — this is a different, looser, more ingredient-forward register, and it's very good at it.
The Verdict
