You can spend time alone in a pub, cafe or restaurant, but nothing will make you feel as 007-suave as sitting solo at a cocktail bar. Three Sheets in Dalston was the first cocktail bar I went to by myself, and it drew me in because it had all the hallmarks of a place where you’d want to wallow in your solitude, highball in hand, feeling like a young, fun, woman in the city.
The magnetism I felt towards Three Sheets’ front door was no isolated incident, either. The prime intention set out by Mancunian brothers and co-owners Noel and Max Venning, who recently opened Three Sheets Soho, was to create bars where people wanted to come in and drink. It might sound self-explanatory, but in a scene that often gets bogged down with concepts and ideologies, it pays to serve approachable, well-made, reinvented classics that people fancy sipping.
Scottish Coffee
Charlie McKay
“Flavour is the main driver,” says Noel. “Most drinks here will have a few recognisable ingredients and then several lesser-known ones that pique your interest.” Whether it’s basil-reminiscent Ethiopian koseret tea and olive oil substituted for olive brine in the Dirty Martini to bring savouriness, or the sprinkling of five spice in the Sazzaquack to mimic absinthe, these are deeply considered concoctions that preoccupy the papillae.
When flavour is paramount, the R&D of such cocktails is understandably lengthy. The Dirty Martini took a year to develop; the Bramble took several months. It all happens in the Dalston branch under the experienced hands of Rosey Mitchell and Simone Tasini, who’ve been developing drinks for Three Sheets for over six years.
The Dirty Martini took a year to develop; the Bramble took several months
Unlike some bars that rely on extraterrestrial-looking centrifuges and vacuum chambers, Three Sheets leans on kitchen techniques that chefs have used for decades to achieve clarity and intensity. “We don’t cheat to make them clear,” says Noel. “Take the White Russian, which is clarified using egg white, as you would a consommé in your kitchen.” Although both branches share a few cocktails on their menus, like the White Russian, Stonefence, and Scotch Coffee, the menu at the Soho outpost is less changeable, catering for Soho’s unquenchable thirst for booze. The plan is to change the menu here in parcels of five drinks every three months.
Mezcal Sunset
Charlie McKay
In terms of design, both bars are equally engineered with the drinker as the focus. Soho, which nods to Dalston, eschews the ego of a flashy drinks wall and limelight on mixologists in favour of spotlit tables and a table-shaped bar to encourage stool-dwellers to speak to each other.
As with any sophomore album, the pressure to replicate the success of the first Three Sheets was titanic. But both brothers, with years of experience on the Manchester bar scene and The Drinks Factory under their aprons, have ensured Soho’s opening was as smooth as their Pisco Sours.
