Being a city with tightly-packed buildings and frankly aggressive weather, London doesn’t immediately announce itself as a place to grab an alfresco drink. However, a renewed love of the great outdoors – something to do with being inside a lot recently, I imagine – has seen Londoners flock to the city’s terraces at the first rumour of spring. The good news is that among our optimistic outdoor drinking spaces there are some real gems, from rooftop bars to manicured terraces. These are some of the best.
Roof Garden at Pantechnicon – Belgravia
Head mixologist Gento Torigata – seen lately at Gibson Bar in Singapore – has put together a seriously impressive cocktail menu that unites Pantechnicon’s Japanese and Scandinavian influences. Caraway scented akavit and birch sap wine sit on the list alongside oysters, kombu, and shochu. The clever part, is that these novel ingredients are passed across the bar in familiar forms that bely the innovative flavour combinations.
The Margarita made with Tequila, wasabi vodka, apple eau-de-vie, smoked chilli, and lime is an excellent riff on the classic formula that dials up the herbaceous notes in the Tequila to 11. This is deft work by a bartender at the top of their game and well-worth a climb to the fifth floor. Another great order if you’re feeling flush, is the show-stopper of an Old Fashioned made with 12-year-old Yamazaki single malt and black sugar from Okinawa – perfectly realised and yours for £30 a throw.
There’s a full menu of food courtesy of the restaurants on the floors below – Sachi and Eldr – making Roof Garden a great option for a long lunch. However, you’d be perfectly happy posting up on the terrace and washing down small plates with an after-work cocktail or three. The arctic char sashimi dressed in zippy sea buckthorn and oysters painted with tomato and wasabi would be particularly good for the purpose.
There’s not much of a view to be had but the space is pretty and stacked with greenery so you’ll not miss it. A retractable roof offers insurance against the unpredictable British climate so this is a good bet even if the skies look suspicious.
Forza Wine – Peckham
The original Forza Win was a fixture of Peckham’s Copeland Park for years, serving unfussy and intensely lovable Italian food in a former warehouse. While the restaurant moves to new digs in Camberwell, the spinoff bar five stories above Rye Lane has you covered for aperitivo, wine, small plates, and a great view of London.
It’s not the loftiest rooftop in town but from this vantage in Zone 2 you get a pretty spectacular slice of skyline to enjoy while you’re knocking down cocktails. The list covers all your favourite Italian café drinks – your Spritzes, your Negronis – with a strong offering of house serves to back them up. The Negroni sour made with gin, sweet vermouth and Campari shaken with lemon juice and egg white is a particular masterstroke. Silky, bittersweet and bracing, it’s Just the thing to sharpen up your appetite before you order some food.
The menu changes regularly, but always comes with a healthy selection of seasonal veg running through it. Just lately they’ve had the first of this year’s Asparagus with parmesan and hazelnuts – burrata with courgettes, capers and parsley – and braised pork belly with chickpeas and bay. This is the sort of fun, confident Italian cooking that made Forza Win a hit and it’s great to see it translated seamlessly into bar food. The real move here is to roll up with three friends and order the whole menu for a flat £120. Which nets you 12-or-so dishes including a couple of snacky bits and some soft serve ice cream to close out.
Natural and low-intervention wine features heavily, including lots of cloudy, funky, delicious stuff your dad would hate. There are lots of great options around £30 a bottle and a wonderful time to be had working your way through them. Booking is recommended as the place fills up when the weather gets warm.
Dalloway Terrace – Bloomsbury
The extravagantly floral Dalloway Terrace sits just off the Bloomsbury hotel’s Coral Room. It’s styled as a sort of hyper-real English country garden tailor-made for instagramming boozy lunchers but the effect is lovely nonetheless. You’ll be just a just a short skip from Oxford Street when you’re there, but sitting among the exactly manicured flower arrangements on a sunny day will make the bustle feel much further away.
There’s menu of tasty, dependable bistro-ish fare and a pretty classic wine list with an extensive arsenal of fizz. But the cocktails and the setting are the real reason to stop by. The excellent bar staff supply a repertoire of classics on request but until the end of May they’re also serving a takeover menu from pronunciation-defying whisky distillery Bruichladdich.
Top of your hit-list should be The Scotsman, made with the brand’s flagship single malt the Classic Laddie, Belle De Brillet – a Cognac-based pear liqueur – jasmine syrup, and limoncello. The sweeter ingredients play up the orchard fruit and vanilla in the whisky, offering assurance that west coast malt isn’t all about smoke and salt. It would be a shame to leave without also ordering the Islay Martini which reinforces the fresh, herbal profile of The Botanist dry gin with citrus and rosemary oils. A class act.
Kerb at the Understudy – Southbank
While London is undeniably one of the world’s great cities, you’d be hard pressed to say it was the prettiest. That said, the big smoke does have its angles. One such vantage can be found in the concreted shade of the National Theatre where you have a nice view of the river and some open sky from the tree-lined Southbank.
The Understudy bar there is good fun whatever the weather but its outside seating really comes into its own when the sun is out. The prospect of boozing by one of London’s great pieces of architecture is enticing in itself. But this summer the adjacent space will also host street food megalith Kerb with all the attendant tacos and friend chicken that come with it. London isn’t short of places that fit this bill but what you have here is a particularly good version of the formula.
Bethnal Green distillers East London Liquor company are on hand with cocktails featuring their own gin, rum and whisky while brews are supplied by craft outfit Gipsy Hill. The great and good of local craft all present and correct.
This is not the ritziest terrace on the list, or the most expensive, but it’s nonetheless a great bet for an after-work drink and a bite. Come for the National theatre’s impressive grey visage, stay for a pint, stay even longer for a naan wrapped lamb kebab from Baba Dhaba. They also do shows inside, apparently – that could be worth checking that out as well.
The American Bar at the Stafford – Mayfair
One of the original American bars that sprung up in the early 20th century to serve cocktails to London’s transatlantic visitors. These venues are an important part of Britain’s bar culture, but they do tend to be clubby drinking dens rather than spots in which to spend a spring afternoon. Not so at the Stafford, where the American Bar spills out onto a nicely appointed courtyard – a little cobbled oasis just off Piccadilly.
The drinks are spot on, as you’d hope from a venue of this pedigree, and it’s fitting to order something American Bar-ish like a French 75 or a White Lady on arrival. But delve a little deeper and you’ll discover some very smart variations on classic forms. Several negroni riffs populate a page toward to back of the list offering ideal pre-dinner sharpeners (I know, more Negronis – what can I say? Italy looms almost as large in our cocktail bars as America does).
There’s a particularly impressive example comprising Ginepraio gin, Campari, and a house blend of vermouths aged on site in a clay amphora. The piece of ancestral winemaking kit smooths the edges of the Negroni, leaving it soft and slightly earthy. It’s a neat drink that shows this old dog is more than capable of pulling a few new tricks.
As spring marches on the cocktail list is set to change, accompanying regular barbecues and a new food menu by Lisa Goodwin-Allen, executive chef at Michelin starred Northcote in Lancashire. All of which promises to be similarly impressive.
The Culpeper – Spitalfields
This pub with rooms on Commercial Street is slightly too perfect to be an authentic East End Boozer. The décor is too chic, the food is too good and the exceptionally photogenic terrace upstairs doesn’t fit the template at all. With all of that said, the roof garden is definitely the most inviting in the area and should become part of your regular rotation if you live within ten miles.
The tables and chairs up there jostle for space the among herbs and vegetables, merrily growing away before they’re sent to the kitchen downstairs. There’s something inherently calming about being among all these plants that just puts you in a good mood. In many ways, it’s the inverse of the professionally primped foliage at Dalloway Terrace.
Some of the produce will wind up in a very reasonable set lunch menu (£35 with three courses and a few nibbles) that showcases head chef Pawel Ojdowski’s meticulous approach to sourcing produce. Grilled oysters with gremolata, Lamb shoulder with Romanesco and a veggie shish of asparagus, onion and courgette are all well-judged and generally delightful.
For post 5pm drinks, the bar carries a nice selection of well-kept – if punchily priced – ales, wines, and a few classic cocktails. The garden is walk in only for drinkers, but if you time it right you can order a bottle or a couple of pints and head up there to watch the sun set over the city. A real treat.
Comments