Twenty-Two Pounds for Three Martinis and a History Lesson
A basement Art Deco cocktail room under Brasserie Zédel that takes the classic canon seriously and prices it like it wants you to stay for a second round.
The stairs down from Brasserie Zédel's foyer are the point. You come in off Sherwood Street expecting the brasserie — the yellow marble, the gold, the din of steak frites at three sittings a night — and instead you cut across the ground floor, drop a level, and land in a room that has decided it is 1932 and nothing has happened since. Varnished dark wood. Gilded fittings. Low booths in plush velvet. A cocktail list organised by act: pre-prohibition, prohibition, post-prohibition, with historical notes for anyone who wants to read while they drink.
The operator is the same group that runs The Wolseley, which explains the confidence of the room and the fact that nothing on the menu feels like it was designed by committee. This is a classicist bar. It is not trying to be a laboratory. It is trying to make a Turf Club the way a Turf Club was made in 1884, and to sell you three of them on a small tray for the price of a single cocktail at most Mayfair hotel bars.
A room that treats the classic cocktail canon as a working library and prices the martini trilogy accordingly.
Editorial Deep
The Martini Trilogy is the move. £22 for a mini flight that walks you from the drink's ancestors to its modern shape, with a Manhattan sitting in the middle of the chronology as a signpost. Order it first. It does the work a bar menu should do — tells you what the room cares about, gives you a reference point for the rest of the list, and settles a table without anyone having to argue about who's having what.
You can hold a conversation at a normal volume, which is the first thing to say about a basement bar in Soho on a Friday night. The room absorbs sound — the velvet, the wood panelling, the low ceiling — and the music sits under the talking rather than over it. No one is shouting a drink order.
Pre-theatre couples early, brasserie diners drifting down for a nightcap late, and a steady middle shift of Soho people who have figured out that a basement two floors below Piccadilly Circus is quieter than anywhere at street level. It skews older than a Dean Street cocktail bar and more mixed than a hotel bar. No one is filming their drink. The energy is conversational rather than performative, which is exactly what a room built around martinis needs the crowd to be.
The Bronx is £14.75, the Cadillac Margarita £36, and the Martini Trilogy shares three minis for £22 between two. The Trilogy at £22 is the single best-priced item on the bar list — three drinks for meaningfully less than one costs at the Connaught. The rest of the menu is not cheap, but it is honest. Nothing on the bill is overpriced relative to the room, and the room is doing more work than most Soho basements at the price.
This is the best version of a classicist cocktail bar in central London — a room that takes the canon seriously, executes it accurately, and doesn't ask you to sit through a lecture about foraged bitters. Come back before dinner at Zédel upstairs, or come back at eleven for a Turf Club and a bowl of the smoky popcorn and leave by midnight. The people who should not come back are the ones who want a bar to surprise them. Nothing here will. That's the design.
Order this
Drink this.
Martini Trilogy (£22); Turf Club; smoky popcorn on the table
“Go for the Martini Trilogy and a booth. Skip if you want a bar to reinvent something.”
The best-priced classic cocktail room in central London, tucked below Brasserie Zédel and run with the same confidence. The Martini Trilogy at £22 is genuinely underpriced. The bartenders execute the canon accurately, the room absorbs sound the way a good basement should, and the walk-in-only policy means you can end up here on a whim. Come before or after dinner upstairs, sit in a booth, order the Trilogy first.
The Verdict
