Mr Lyan: My Career in Five Drinks
Mr Lyan’s new bar, Seed Library, marks a move towards a simpler menu design and development process. We speak to the bartender about the cocktails that have defined his storied career
Published: Tuesday 24th May 2022
Biology. Anthropology. The cradle of life. Space travel. These aren’t necessarily concepts you’d expect to find yourself talking about in a cocktail bar (or if they are, they’re not ones you’d expect to have been directly inspired by what you’re sipping).
But Ryan Chetiyawardana, more commonly known as the bartender Mr Lyan, is not known for doing the expected when it comes to cocktails. His career began, like so many, at a handful of the best cocktail venues in the UK in years gone by before he opened his first bar White Lyan in Shoreditch in 2013. From this point, it was obvious that, Chetiyawardana’s modus operandi wasn’t simply to serve you a great drink, but to make you think while you’re drinking it, too. As well as a drinking den, White Lyan was a comment on the wastefulness and pollution that would begin to dominate the cultural conversation over the following years, featuring batched cocktails that used no fresh ingredients and therefore generated no waste on-site.
But it was his next opening, Dandelyan, that catapulted him into the centre of the world’s bar culture. A beautiful, gleaming bar at what was then the Mondrian hotel on the Southbank, its overtly conceptual menus and crazy house-made ingredients helped usher in a cerebral approach to cocktail-making, and saw the bar win the top award at both the World’s 50 Best Bars awards and Tales of the Cocktail. Alongside the hotel’s rebranding as Sea Containers London, the bar was renamed and relaunched as Lyaness in 2018.
Each venue’s cocktail list is rooted in anthropology and scientific research, with drinks inspired by advances in human history
The approach remained similar, as the team collaborated on ingredients and cocktails aimed to encourage drinkers to consider the world around them. And that philosophy was expanded with the group’s first international openings, Super Lyan in Amsterdam and Silver Lyan in Washington DC. In true Lyan style, each venue’s cocktail list is rooted in anthropology and scientific research, and feature drinks inspired by advances in human history.
It’s for this reason that his newest opening, Seed Library, at the One Hundred Shoreditch hotel, is eyebrow-raising. Rather than concept-heavy menus, the bar team have opted for the opposite: an “analogue, lo-fi” approach to both the drinks and the space. “This felt very different as an idea,” explains Chetiyawardana. “It tapped into people wanting something that feels a little bit more homely, a little bit more relaxed, even down to some of the fuzziness, the imperfections. It was about the restriction of it, and seeing what happens when we don’t over-polish something.” Instead of grandiose quarterly menus, Seed Library will work according to what suppliers can give them. The drinks list will change regularly, and is designed to be, in relative terms, simple.
Here, we trace the drinks that have defined the career of a restless mind, which has been carried by relentless innovation – even if that innovation is, now, about the pleasure of classic cocktails with a twist, no concrete tincture in sight.
Beeswax Old Fashioned
Super Lyan (Amsterdam)
“This is an interesting one, because it’s White Lyan, it’s Super Lyan, it’s probably the drink that’s spread the most from the family, so it goes right back to those origin points. It was probably the first drink I made for White Lyan, when I was playing around with texture and aroma. We ended up working with Nordic Food Lab on things like waxes, and it wasn’t something that was used in food or drink at the time. Part of my biology degree was studying bees, and I was obsessed with honeys and waxes, so I started doing some experiments at home. And having tried some really old whiskies, that was an aspect I wanted to bring back, so for White Lyan, we had our own scotch, and then we based this like real waxy, rich textural element around it. We did a different version when it was Super Lyan London, and then when we opened in Amsterdam, we used some local whiskies in it. It was just taking an idea that was really close to us and then putting it through a completely different lens, and that was, I suppose, a lot of Super Lyan’s philosophy. It’s really nice now that you’ve seen beeswax crop up on food menus and drinks menus around the world. I think the drink has just become synonymous with the company. People reference it back to like coming into White Lyan, or trying this, or hearing about it, and it’s really nice to see that spread. I put it in an online recipe series to give people an insight into some of our thinking and process – I wasn’t sure that anybody would reproduce it, but it’s probably the drink that I’ve seen people make the most. It just felt like a really important drink in the journey of what we were doing. It still remains, we’ve still riffed on it, but we still use it. It’s still a favourite.”
Project Apollo
Silver Lyan (Washington DC)
“Silver’s all about cultural exchange and the idea of what happens when you mix different knowledge sets. We found all these amazing stories that had flowed through DC – the Capitol, the role of the Americas, all of those things – but one that really excited me was the Apollo missions, and the changes that happened as a result of those missions was a really interesting aspect of that research. When they first sent astronauts up, it was so tough on their body that they just felt really miserable. NASA reflected on this and they were like, ‘One of the key things that we can change in that is food.’ The most success they had was pineapple, because it feels so exotic, it feels so of Earth and special, so they started including freeze-dried pineapple in the missions, and we referenced that. We used this sour pineapple, which has this exoticism to it, and then on the first Apollo missions, they brought back samples from the moon, and you can open-source that data. Because we couldn’t get moon rocks, we looked at what the composition of them was and recreated that, and because the drink ends up quite fruity, it acts as this quite mineral underpinning to the drink. It’s got a lot of rich, iron-heavy salts and things like that, so you end up with quite a fruity drink with this structure and dryness underneath it, so it doesn’t end up tasting like candy. And then we do a raspberry dust on the top because again, when they were bringing back these samples, they did an analysis of the Milky Way and they found a component called ethyl formate, which is one of the key esters in raspberry. So space smells like raspberries, and that was a really fun thing to like throw in. There’s a bit of a tease in the menu about some of these stories, so if somebody wants to know, we can talk about all these different things. It excites people, especially in America, to learn about some of their history. I think it’s quite a neat summary of what we do at Silver.”
Pinnacle Point Fizz
Dandelyan
“This is from around 2017, when we were really rolling at Dandelyan and the whole team were working on drinks. It’s a really fun one, because we were really delving into some of these human stories behind food and drink, and there was a place in South Africa called Pinnacle Point, where they discovered the fact that humans were baking and transforming both tools and ingredients. This was when we were looking at the transformation of things, and I also think there was something interesting in the idea of hunting and bringing back ingredients – pineapples, sloe berries, shrub bushes and similar things. But it was also things like nixtamalisation – the transformation through cooking that gave us more nutrients. It’s a really important part of the world for humanity and where we came from. So the drink references a lot of those stories, but it’s a light, fruity tequila banger at the same time. That was really the point of these drinks in Dandelyan – they were pretty drinks, they were served in a really playful way, and again on the menu we’d have all these little teases and bits of info, so if somebody was like, ‘What are you talking about in terms of the Pinnacle Point?’ or ‘What does nixtamalisation mean?’, you could seed in some of these other stories about food and history to get people to understand a bit more if they wanted to know. It’s a way of going ‘If you don’t want to know you’ve got a delicious drink. But if you are intrigued, food is a culture, it’s embedded into all of history, so there’s these interesting anthropological stories.’”
Plum Americano
Lyaness
“From Dandelyan through to Lyaness, it was always about going, ‘How do we do we open up cocktails to more people?’ We got all the cocktail drinkers excited with Dandeylan – if you were into cocktails, you probably came through the bar at some point – but we believe in the ability of cocktails to transform, and we were really proud of these weird ingredients we were creating. We came to this last menu and we were going ‘Actually, people’s repulsions are really fascinating. What puts people off? What is a barrier to people?’ So with this ingredient, we’ve made a curaçao – a bit of a bartenders’ ketchup, it’s used in so many classics – but we’ve made it out of pigs’ blood, something that people are pretty wary of even though it’s a really historic part of our cuisine. We’ve been really lucky to work with a lot of food scientists, as well as Douglas from Silo, and we were like, ‘What’s a really abundant ingredient? How could we take all the ideas and frame it through something that we have literally masses of, so it can be a celebration of flavour, but also good for the planet?’ And so much pigs’ blood is wasted. So we took it and said ‘Why can’t this just be our liqueur?’ It doesn’t taste bloody, but there’s a fullness to it. With the Americano, we do some gentle accents around it. We use Empirical’s ‘Plum, I Suppose’ spirit, so it’s got a little bit of an almond blossom note to it, backing it up with some of the bitterness, we’re using a British bitters, and then the curaçao. It has a lot of the structure of a classic americano, but it’s got this like real high/low thing going on. It’s very clean because of the plum, it’s got this real delicate floral note to it, and then a lot more base comes through because of the curaçao. To me, it was a really elegant way of demonstrating what we do with ingredients.”
Coriander Seed Gimlet (alcoholic and non-alcoholic)
Seed Library
“Non-alcoholic drinks are something we’ve done from the early days, but how we do them has evolved. At White Lyan and Dandelyan we used to have a separate section, and then we realised it ended up alienating people. The first time we put a drink on the menu that was essentially like a martini, it was the the number-one-selling boozeless drink. The fact that people could cheers, and feel part of the situation, was a real lightbulb moment for us, so we switched from doing a section to covering a minimum 40% of the menu in boozeless forms here. This drink is a nice reflection of that idea of origin points: it’s a two-ingredient drink – it’s gin and cordial, that’s it – but instead of the classic citrus profile of lime with all of that heavy-flavour zestiness, it was going ‘What would it look like if we went right back to that point?’ Classically in a lot of gins, the citrus note came from coriander seed – we sourced some from an Indian spice supplier and they just had this incredible balance of earthiness and citrus pop. So instead of using a lime to give that contrast, we use coriander seed to give the same balance and structure. You get that same idea of it being zippy and clean and highlighting the aspects of the gin, but instead of overbearing it with oily citrus notes, it has this gentle underpinning of earthiness and a bit of warmth. It’s really elegant, super stripped back – we haven’t dialled in just to show off the citrus notes of the coriander, we’re letting that base note come through in there as well – but it drinks like a gimlet, and it is still that clean sipper that you want when you go to that drink. You’re not gonna upset somebody, – you’re not serving a strawberry daiquiri when they want an old fashioned – but it’s a different profile because we’re using that different starting point.”
