Proving that the City isn’t all suits and boardrooms, The Alchemist arrives bringing cool cocktails and molecular mixology to Aldgate…
The concept: Any Northern soul will already be familiar with the Living Ventures hospitality group, with its various restaurants and bars (The Botanist, Gusto, Blackhouse) scattered across northern cities. As a true Northern girl with roots in Cheshire and a university education in Leeds, I’m well aware of The Alchemist: a swanky restaurant with crowd-pleasing dishes and seriously killer cocktails — ones that steam, bubble and even change colour.
**The décor and atmosphere: Upmarket and **slick like the rest of the group’s bars and restaurants, The Alchemist is cool. With its Twenties-esque graphics, glimmering golden highlights and raw, New York Style architectural features, it’s somewhere you might imagine Jay Gatsby would’ve hung out, though in 2015 it’s where women where Cos LBDs and expensive designer heels. We went relatively early on a Friday night and the place was packed. Groups of suits having lively after-work drinks filled the bar are and spilled out on to the street, whilst the seated restaurant area was buzzing with couples on dates, sophisticated parties of four with glasses of fizz, and tables of dressed up girls gabbing over sharing platters. Whilst this place seems swish, with seriously impressive cocktails averaging £7.50 and mains plates at £10-15, it’s actually surprisingly affordable.
**The food and drink: **
Though this is a restaurants and the food is tasty, The Alchemist is definitely more about the drinks. More specifically the Instagrammable, social media-worthy, molecular mixology cocktails. After spending a good 20 minutes studying the drinks menu and telling the waiter to go away and come back twice, we finally decided on our drinks by doing the old cover your eyes and point technique. The menu is vast and unless you are excruciatingly specific about what you like to drink, you will struggle to choose. My random point gave me the Smokey Old Fashioned, who’s sweet ’n’ smoky deliciousness consisted of bourbon, maple syrup, Jerry Thomas Bitters, the smoke of charred oak chips, and a comically large ice ball (cleverly fashioned to barely melt). My partner picked what the waiter describes as a ‘ladylike cocktail’, which was Beefeater gin, rose liqueur, violet liqueur, lavender foam and white grape juice. Putting his macho side to one side, he sips his sweet, floral cocktail with glee, appreciating the Parma Violet-tasting lavender foam to be a damn sight different to his usual Friday night foam on a pint.
After whetting our whistles we move onto food, ordering the sharing platter to start, which at £13.95 is very generous and more than enough for two. The bento box style platter came with marinated chicken wings, loaded Mexican nachos, crispy fried prawns, and delicious chicken pot stickers, and is ultimately a pile of tasty, slightly random snack bits which here they’ve branded as ‘tapetizers’. The rest of the menu continued to traverse continents with everything from Thai red curry to jerk chicken, fajitas, ramen and fish and chips as main plates. I opt for what I consider to be the most exciting dish on the menu, the Tandoori mackerel fillets which come with a giant bowl of Israeli couscous, flavoured with lemon and cranberries. On the other side of the world (yet only yards away) my boyfriend orders the Mexican Cajun chicken fajitas which are served still sizzling on a hot plate with all the DIY ingredients. Our meals are good and go down well but ultimately I’d argue that the dishes here are just tasty stomach fillers and generic crowd-pleasers, which are executed no better than that of a gourmet pub. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; given they’re affordable, large portions and the general atmosphere is great, sometimes basic dishes are all one really wants.
We’re too full for pudding so instead the waiter suggests liquid dessert. At £20, the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party cocktail seems steep until it arrives and you forget about the cost completely. This is the highlight of our visit, and everyone’s around us in fact as customers on neighbouring tables turn around, take photos, and stare in wondrous awe. On our table, we have a science experiment going on. A very alcoholic one, with vodka, Cointreau, elderflower liqueur, citron gomme and water bubbling through a glass receptacle, infusing with strawberries, orange and mint, and being poured into two conical flasks with white crystals in the bottom, at which point The Alchemist’s signature theatrics take place, science takes over, and white steam floods the table top. So much so I can barely see Ed through the fog. When it clears and we calm down (I find this very exciting), the waiter pours the cocktail into tea cups for us to sample. It’s sweet and delicious and I can’t decide whether it’s the excitement or the Cointreau that has us leaving our table all giddy…
The verdict: Open for brunch, lunch, early breakfast briefings, post-work tipples and late nights too, The Alchemist is a great new addition to the City, and one that’s definitely worth remembering if you find yourself thirsty and East and without a plan. For more organised folk, it’s a perfect spot for a week night date being intimate and sophisticatedly boozy, and likewise, ideal for a Friday or Saturday night that can be as wild as you want it, depending on how much you sample the cocktail menu. Don’t forgo the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.
The Alchemist, 6 Bevis Marks, London, EC3A 7BA thealchemist.uk.com
by Alice Tate — www.flashanthology.com — @ALICETATE_