Six Seats, One Email, and a Bar That Doesn't Take Bookings
Erik Lorincz's Mayfair cocktail room runs on two tracks — walk in for the main bar, email for the six-seat omakase. The Kwānt on tap is the order.
A steel bar the length of the room, yolk-yellow bouclé chairs pulled up to chess-board tables, and a matcha-tinted cocktail pouring from a tap behind the counter. That last one is called the Kwānt, the bar's namesake — Roku gin, St. Germain, grapefruit, matcha — and it is the drink that anchors everything else on the list.
Erik Lorincz opened this in Mayfair with Mourad Mazouz after a long run as Head Bartender at the American Bar at the Savoy, which is the credential that matters for reading the room. Kwãnt is not a scene bar dressed up as a cocktail bar. It is a cocktail bar with a serious vintage-spirits back bar, a Polynesian-tinged interior that leans hard into 1940s Casablanca, and a seven-course omakase that seats six people three nights a week. It has been on The World's 50 Best Bars list since 2019, peaked at No. 6 in 2020 and sits at No. 79 on the 2025 list.
Kwãnt is the rare Mayfair cocktail room where the drink on tap is also the one worth ordering.
Editorial Deep
The Kwānt is the drink to order. Roku gin, St. Germain elderflower, grapefruit juice and matcha, batched and pulled from a tap behind the steel bar — bitter, floral, faintly savoury from the matcha, and paced for a second one. The batching is the tell. This is not a corner-cutting move; it is Lorincz applying Savoy-trained discipline to a drink that has to hit the same way at 6pm on a Tuesday and 11pm on a Saturday.
You can hold a conversation across the table at a normal volume until about 10pm, when it tightens. The music sits under the room rather than on top of it, and the ceiling — high, with bamboo detailing and slow-turning fans — absorbs enough that nothing bounces.
Mayfair hotel-adjacent, which is to say: a mix of guests walking over from the Green Park hotels, a serious cocktail crowd who came for Lorincz specifically, and a well-dressed local set who treat this as a neighbourhood room. The pace is unhurried early and picks up after nine. Nobody is waiting on your stool the way they would at a Soho counter, which is part of what you're paying for — the crowd here funds the room's patience, and the room rewards you for staying.
Two rounds of cocktails and a plate of snacks lands in solid Mayfair upper-tier territory — meaningfully more than a Soho cocktail bar, in line with the palace hotel bars a few streets away. Individual cocktail prices are not published, so expect Connaught-adjacent numbers without the Connaught Bar's booking-required friction.
This is the best version of what a serious Mayfair cocktail bar looks like when it isn't attached to a hotel — a proper programme, a room that holds a long sit, and a door that doesn't make you plan around it. Come back on a Thursday for the omakase if you can get one of the six seats; come back on a Tuesday at 6pm if you want the bar quiet enough to talk to whoever is pouring. Skip it if you want a scene, and skip the omakase if you were hoping to book it on an app — it does not exist on one.
Order this
Drink this.
The Kwānt on tap — Roku gin, St. Germain, grapefruit, matcha
“Walk in for the tap Kwānt; email for the six-seat omakase; skip if you wanted a scene.”
One of the few serious Mayfair cocktail rooms you can drink at without a reservation. The Kwānt on tap is the anchor drink and the reason to sit at the bar rather than a table; the vintage back bar rewards a knowledgeable ask. The seven-course omakase (Thu-Sat, 6pm, six seats) is a separate, email-only track — buy the voucher on the Square site, then email kwantmayfair@icloud.com to hold a date. Pricing sits Connaught-adjacent, so this is not the value pick of the postcode. Go for the drinks and the room; skip if the point of the night was being seen.
The Verdict
