“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.
Karl Byrne , One of several bespoke £1,000 Enigma machines that we used to send coded information to the mixologists at The Bletchley (Photo credit: Karl Byrne)
As an additional twist, visitors are given an Army jacket when they take their seats at their table, and are presented with a beautiful, custom-made Enigma machine, each of which cost £1,000 to create, that visitors must wire correctly by following instructions and finding clues. Once the Enigma machine has been wired correctly, visitors must transmit information to the eager mixologists who will create a once-in-a-lifetime cocktail based on this personalized information.
Statistics fans are probably wondering how exactly this is possible; as the ‘codes’ transmitted are tied to a visitor’s date of birth and results from a series of games, the final ingredients that the code uncovers are so unique that no visitor to The Bletchley should ever receive the same cocktails as anyone else in attendance.
Meanwhile, booze-chemistry fans that know their way around a drinks cabinet are twitching at the thought of breaking the ‘perfect cocktail rule’ or proportions. There is a rhyme that helps you successfully balance a cocktail by using the correct amounts of each of your ingredients. “One of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, and four of weak” is a motto that ought to help you balance most ingredients nicely. For example, if you were to raid your fridge-freezer and find nothing more than a bottle of vodka, a carton of apple juice, a lime that has seen better days and some elder flower cordial, like I once did (for science, you understand, dear reader) you too would be able to make the very tasty ‘Suzitini’ - simply use the correct amounts of each ingredient; one portion of sour, in this case the lime, combined with two of sweet, which would be the elder flower, then adding three of strong which takes care of the vodka, and topping up with four of weak, which is the apple juice. Et voilà! One cocktail that should be scrumptiously drinkable, thanks to a good balance of ingredients.
Karl Byrne , Our Enigma machine, radio transmitter, and most importantly cocktails on our table at The Bletchley (Photo credit: Karl Byrne)
The gamification of this cocktail experience included sending coded messages by radio, using an Enigma machine to generate a scrambled message, and taking part in some cunning flavor and mood tests. The public’s pursuit of increasingly personalized experiences sets The Bletchley up for a long and successful run. The décor is beautifully detailed, with equations adorning the dark walls, ceiling and bar mirrors, but Lyall also wanted to take the opportunity to not only honor those that fought in the war or contributed to the war effort, but also to showcase the stark reality of some of the numbers killed in the war from different countries. Like me, Lyall has some ancestral heritage in India, and even I was surprised by the number of people that lost their lives in the war when he explained what the numbers in one particular list stood for. In this time of global political uncertainty, it was certainly a timely reminder of past mistakes.