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“You are the blank canvas. You pick the colors and we choose how to use them.” These poetic words were uttered by one Sebastian Lyall when I caught up with him at his new venture. Lyall is the Founder and Creative Director at Lollipop, a company that turn the everyday into an immersive experience. Lollipop are the brains behind The Bunyadi, the much publicized naked restaurant in Elephant and Castle, South London, and ABQ, the Breaking Bad themed bar housed inside a Winnebago in Hackney, East London. The latter requires visitors to ‘cook’ their drinks, finishing off cocktails using a range of scientific techniques to enhance them and give them a final flourish. I’ll be talking more about some of the techniques used there next month, but this month it is all about the hot new project under Lollipop’s belt that was truly deserving of such a poetic quote from Lyall.

A month ago, The Bletchley flung open its doors to Chelsea’s curious coding and cocktail clientele - well, I say ‘flung’, but what I mean is secretly and tentatively left ajar a door that looked as out of time as Captain America; a more accurate description of the modest fanfare that accompanied The Bletchley’s opening week. Billed as a bar with a theme residing somewhere between Sherlock and Alan Turing, The Bletchley was already hugely popular even before it opened to visitors in March, as evidenced by its waiting list of over 7,000 people. The bar’s unique selling point is its promise to create a one-off, entirely unique cocktail for each visitor by asking them to crack their own personal ‘Enigma code’, the very essence of who you are, based on a series of games that are designed to reveal different flavor likes and dislikes. Once your cocktail has been made, it will never be made again. As Lyall said, we were the canvases for the mixologists; a complex and interesting platform on which to create.