Owls are wise. Cranes are graceful. Orioles are adventurous. The Baltimore oriole, a long-distance migratory bird, is so intrepid it flies thousands of miles from North America to South each winter. It’s a journey so perilous much of the flock dies en route.
A place you shan’t perish en route (unless you choose to cycle home with enough ABV coursing through your veins) is the cocktail bar named after the bird. In the spirit of travel, a visit to Oriole sees you clock up enough Avios points to purchase the planet once you’re finished with the geographically themed cocktail list, which whisks you from Provence to Nova Scotia to Kyushu. Nominally an Oriole but metaphorically a phoenix, this is the bar’s second iteration, having risen from the ashes since it was forced to relocate from its original outpost in the bowels of Smithfield Meat Market. It has taken over a year for this “tik-easy” to find a new nest, but in August, it finally found a new home in Covent Garden.
The Bamboo Bar
Eleonora Boscarelli
Swapping a backdrop of poultry butchery for theatreland, Oriole still seeks to transport you to another world upon entry – a flamboyant, vintage-styled drinking den serving worldly cocktails accompanied by live jazz performances. New to Oriole 2.0 is an upstairs bar pouring draught cocktails and a full-fledged food offering; after all, we’ve all learned the hard way that crisps don’t constitute dinner.
Mother hens to Oriole, alongside acclaimed bars Nightjar and Bar Swift, are husband and wife duo Roisin Stimpson and Edmund Weil. Having clinched positions on the World’s 50 Best Bars list for all three spots, you’d think they had decades of experience in the business, but when starting out, they were mere fledglings. “We loved hosting people and throwing parties. We were enthusiastic home mixologists, and Roisin is also a jazz singer,” says Weil. “These were all passions of ours, but we came in with zero experience.”
Amori cocktail
David Robson
Begerac cocktail
David Robson
Now self-proclaimed “old hands”, the making of Oriole’s drinks has also come a long way since the early days. “We started out very analogue, and although the drinks were very high-concept, we used things like old-school drip coffee filters to clarify. It was effective but arduous,” says Weil. Spearheaded by bar director and cocktail developer Samet Ali, Oriole’s brand-spanking R&D lab touts a Sonicprep – an ultrasonic sound wave-producing gizmo able to extract, infuse, homogenise, emulsify and even rapidly create barrel-aged flavour – and a centrifuge used to clarify everything from claggy peanut butter in the flagship cocktail Acadia, to banana in the Calypso. A well-travelled cocktail menu inevitably invites a roster of willfully obscure ingredients (I’m yet to find oyster flowers, orris root, and fuji apple in Tesco anyway), so meticulous sourcing and research is part of the process of developing drinks, which Ali says takes up to a year.
The bar itself, reminiscent of a geisha’s kimono spliced with a magpie’s shiny stash, takes inspiration from New York’s Stork Club – a fabled 1940s nightspot whose sparkling Hollywood clientele included Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. Fortunately, this time around, you don’t have to spread your wings and fly across the pond to drink like an A-lister.
