Ask for a Bar Seat or Skip the Reservation
Ryan Chetiyawardana's Sea Containers cocktail room was on the World's 50 Best Bars list in 2019, 2021 and 2024, but the drink you'll remember isn't on the menu — and you only get it by sitting at the bar.
A Lo-Fi Hard Shake lands in front of you — Irish whiskey, coconut kefir, amazake, lemon — and the bartender leans in to ask what else you like. That single exchange is why Lyaness sits where it does on every list that matters, and why a table on the lounge side is the wrong seat in the room.
Ryan Chetiyawardana opened Lyaness in 2019 in the exact Sea Containers space where his previous project Dandelyan had been crowned World's Best Bar the year before. He closed one bar at its peak and built another on the same floor. In 2024 Lyaness took the World's 50 Best Siete Misterios Best Cocktail Menu Award, and it became the first bar to receive a 3 PIN award from The Pinnacle Guide. The programme is ingredient-forward rather than spirit-forward — the menu reads by ferment and by unusual distillation before it reads by base spirit — and the room is built to have a conversation about that.
The printed menu is excellent and the off-menu drink the bartender makes for you is better, which tells you exactly where to sit.
Editorial Deep
The Heart Yard Highball is the drink to start with if you want to understand what the team is doing here. Heart Cut barley whisky under strawberry wine, smoked cream soda and orange blossom, £17. It's the crushable long serve — savoury under the sweetness, a smoke that lands as texture rather than flavour — and it's the one to hand to the person at your table who wants to like a drink without interrogating it. The Multi Milk is the case for the technique: a milk punch of bourbon, vodka, spilt milk cordial and Thunder Mushrooms, which are fermented grains, legumes and koji spores. It's clarified, cold, savoury, and unlike anything on another cocktail list in London.
You come in through the Sea Containers hotel lobby on Upper Ground, past the reception desk, and the bar is up on the first floor overlooking the Thames. It is not signposted like a destination bar and the walk in is quiet enough that first-timers assume they've taken a wrong turn. Then you're through, and the room opens onto full-height Thames-facing windows with St Paul's directly across the river.
Midweek early evening skews to industry — bartenders on their night off, hotel guests who've done their research, the occasional writer visibly taking notes. It gets busier and more mixed after nine and on weekends, when a cocktail-tourism crowd comes for the name and stays for the drinks. The volume never blows out and nobody is waiting on your stool the way they would at a Soho room half this good. That is what a hotel bar buys you, and Lyaness has quietly one of the better hotel bar crowds in London.
The Heart Yard Highball at £17 defends itself. A long serve built on a proprietary Heart Cut barley whisky with a house smoked cream soda is not something you can make at home or find down the road, and the technique behind it is visible in the glass. From there the maths is straightforward. Signature cocktails run £17–£19. That sits materially below the Connaught Bar tier for drinks doing more interesting work, and above a serious Soho cocktail bar for a comparable round.
Lyaness is the best version of a modern hotel cocktail bar in London that isn't trading on Mayfair mythology. The occasion that brings you back is a Wednesday or Thursday around 6.30pm, two bar seats booked, an hour with a bartender who wants to talk about what's on ice, and a second drink built for you off-menu. Come back for the menu drops — the printed list rotates and the drink you loved last visit will be gone. Do not come back for a big group on a Saturday night; the room is set up for a conversation with the bar, and eight people with a bottle-service brief will not find what makes this room what it is.
Order this
Drink this.
Heart Yard Highball (£17), then whatever the bartender builds off-menu for you
“Sit at the bar and let the bartender go off-menu. That is the version of Lyaness to come for.”
Lyaness is a London cocktail room built on a proprietary-ingredient programme, drinks you cannot get elsewhere, and a Thames-facing hotel bar that never blows out on volume. Go on a weeknight, book a bar seat via SevenRooms, order the Heart Yard Highball first and then hand the second round over to the bartender. Skip if you want a table on the lounge side or a big-group Saturday — the room rewards a conversation at the counter, not a party at the window.
The Verdict
