A recent Guardian report on how council laws were kneecapping London’s nightlife made for some bleak reading – no city in the UK has an earlier bedtime, as policies heavily restrict the opening hours of new establishments. Until 11pm, it’s arguably the best food-and-drink city in the world. Afterwards, you’d have a better time in Swindon.
A Bar with Shapes for a Name managed to circumvent this by staying on the same licence as its building’s previous occupier, a kebab shop. “For other venues, the licence might be 10 or 15 pages. Here, it’s like a page and a half: you can open, you can sell, and that’s basically it,” co-founder Paul Lougrat tells me in the Dalston bar. “There aren’t so many places in London that are open that late – if they are, it’s often a franchise, or a casino. It means you can see the bar change throughout the evening – we open at 6pm and close at 4am. And it attracts a lot of creatives, who maybe don’t have nine-to-five jobs where they have to be up early in the morning.”
That crowd is also drawn by its point of difference: the design – and name – is inspired by the German art and architectural school of Bauhaus, which Lougrat says married the bar’s need for functionality, when it came to space, with creativity for the drinks. Go downstairs and you’ll see what looks a little like a school science lab, where habanero peppers might be distilling in a vat. The staff uniform – jumpsuits of various colours – makes it look like they are about to film an OK Go music video.
Shapes staff planning bar menus
The drinks, however, are relaxed and flavour-forward. “Cocktails can sometimes be a bit difficult, not approachable. People can get a bit geeky about them. And we’re like, let’s just start with something that we would want to drink every day,” Lougrat says. It was conceived by Lougrat and fellow co-founder Rémy Savage before Covid, with the pandemic offering time to refine the vision.
The first drink was inspired by their own tastes, a homemade cocktail that took various shape-shifting forms, at different points incorporating pisco, raspberry, and tonic among other ingredients before landing in its current form, the Pastel – made from vodka, rhubarb, recomposed lime, and soda. The drinks are adventurous and creative, but always with flavour in mind.
Cocktails at Shapes
The Kazimir, made with peach yoghurt vodka
The Kazimir, a martini-adjacent cocktail made with vodka, clarified peach yoghurt, and laced with absinthe, deliciously plays off sweetness, aniseed and strength. ABV and drink size are listed; there’s no watering down here. “I think we had the fear at some point of customers grabbing the ice cube out of their drink and complaining ‘there’s no liquid in here!’ Well, OK, now we can say it’s written on the menu,” Lougrat laughs.
They have twice landed a place on the illustrious World’s 50 Best Bars list – 35th in 2023 and 73rd (on the Discovery List) in 2025 – and they have since opened a second venue around the corner, Warehaus, and run a wholesale drinks side business. The cocktail list is focused and considered rather than extensive, and the late licence gives plenty of time to work through the menu.
