REMY SAVAGE chastises himself as he places his menu back on the table. “I’ll stop playing with this,” he says apologetically. It’s no use. Within a minute or so, the Artesian Bar’s head bartender has unconsciously picked it up again and started twirling it around with his fingers. It’s a curious contraption, this menu – a kind of shapeshifting sculpture in the form of a double-helix which, when given a good spin, magically fans out into something resembling a tree, each branch bearing the name of a drink. It’s not a terribly practical design as far as menus go, to be honest – a more traditional printed version is supplied for those who just want to get on and order – but it is undeniably good fun to mess around with. “Well,” says Savage with a smile, “bars should be fun. I don’t go to bars to be clever.”
Artesian Bar’s head bartender Remy Savage. Photograph: Tristan Jakob-Hoff
Physical design aside, the Artesian’s new Minimalism menu does seem to be a rebuke of sorts to the showy “cleverness” with which the bar has long been associated. Under Savage’s predecessors, Alex Kratena and Simone Caparole, the bar famously topped the World’s 50 Best Bars list for four years running with menus boasting giant chrome ants, mysterious boxes filled with dry ice, and cocktails comprised of seven or eight ingredients each. Savage’s own previous menu for the bar, Artesian Moments, was similarly elaborate, involving advanced spherification techniques, an iron-flavoured sorbet to simulate the taste of blood, and the use of extracts normally found in suntan lotion.
Times change, however. “The Artesian has been open eleven years,” says Savage, who was brought over from Paris’s Little Red Door in late 2017. “It was always famous for innovation and doing new stuff, but obviously eight or nine years later it’s not the new stuff it was a while back.” So what is the new new stuff that animates Savage’s imagination today?
“A curious contraption.” The Minimalism menu at Artesian Bar. Photograph: Tristan Jakob-Hoff
Enter the Minimalism menu. “The idea is to try and see how limitation can eventually fuel creativity,” says Savage. The particular limitation he and his team have imposed upon themselves with this menu is to use just two ingredients per drink – quite a challenge when you consider that two is the bare minimum number of ingredients you can put in a drink and still call it a cocktail. Gone, too, are the giant ants and dry ice – these drinks are presented simply, in unfussy glassware, with the gimmickry of days past kept firmly in check.
There is a degree of humility behind this stripped-down aesthetic. Savage says he was inspired by the Minimalism movement that swept through the American art scene in the late 1960s, when artists abandoned the aggressive solipsism of the abstract expressionists in favour of a calmer, more objective focus on form and colour. Like those Minimalists, Savage wants to “completely forget about the biological justification.”
Nardi Acqua di Cedro and Sandalwood. Photograph: Tristan Jakob-Hoff
“You sometimes see this flavour combination like, ‘my grandmother used to make this pasta sauce, so now I’m making you that pasta sauce even though you don’t know who my grandmother is’. You know, playing with empathy in order to justify a flavour combination. If there’s an emotional connection you have with a drink you’re making, that’s quite interesting – as long as you make it for you. But I don’t relate to this in any way.”
Despite such high-mindedness, Savage and his team have ensured that the drinks retain their characteristic sense of playfulness. As an illustration, Savage makes us a Nardi Acqua di Cedro and Sandalwood. (The austerity has carried over to the drink names – every cocktail is known only by the sum of its ingredients.) Acqua di Cedro is a citrus liqueur with an atypically dry, mineral finish, which on its own is appealingly refreshing. But the addition of the sandalwood – and a little cheeky carbonation – produces a drink that tastes like some delightful new Thai coconut variant of Berocca.
Front: Patrón Silver and Bitter Gourd. Rear: St Germain and Red Carrot. Photograph: Tristan Jakob-Hoff
The St Germain and Red Carrot also tastes like something you might start the day with, were you that way inclined. “A yoga bunny’s answer to a Bloody Mary,” my companion says approvingly. “I’ve never felt more virtuous drinking cocktails.” The Collins-style Armagnac and Zalotti Blossom, meanwhile, has overtones of a basil-and-tomato salad, with a teasing smokiness that gives it a “pretty funky” dimension, to use Savage’s own phrase.
Even the more serious drinks on the menu toy impishly with your expectations. The Courvoisier VSOP and Mid-Roast Coffee might sound like a rich, boozy nightcap – and it is – but through some clever distillation trickery, it arrives at our table perfectly clear. “You would think it’s a glass of water,” says Savage proudly. It’s a pretty damned good glass of water, it must be said – bittersweet and nutty and warmly satisfying. “It’s also a great, great way to get discreetly drunk,” Savage adds with a wink.
Some of the drinks are built with the intention of showcasing a single ingredient. Savage presents us with a Martini Ambrato and Apricot Eau de Vie, before proceeding to wax lyrical about the latter half of the pairing. “It’s made by a gentleman named Vittorio Capovilla – it’s a very small half-bottle of Vesuvian apricot eau de vie that is absolutely spectacular. It’s about £200 for a half-bottle, really rare, really annoying to find, but it’s very justified. I’m completely in love with it.”
Ultimately it’s this love for ingredients that comes across most strongly in this menu. “I don’t get eight ingredient drinks,” says Savage. He thinks the complexity just ends up overwhelming the individual components. “Maybe my palate’s not very sophisticated. But most three Michelin-starred chefs I work with, they don’t get it either.”
And just as three Michelin-starred kitchens seem to have shifted in recent years towards more modest dishes that celebrate the inherent qualities of a few select ingredients, so a similar trend seems to be happening across the bar industry. Because at the end of the day, why shouldn’t two ingredients be enough to produce a highly sophisticated drink? After all, says Savage, “simple ingredients can end up with a very complex result when perfectly matched.”
The results, at least on this showing, speak for themselves.
by Tristan Jakob-Hoff
Artesian Bar
The Langham Hotel
1C Portland Place
London W1B 1JA