With a New Book, London's Connaught Bar Proves It Is the Pinnacle of Luxury
The Connaught Bar in London can credit its success to a cocktail of creative mixologists, elegant atmosphere, and dedication to the experience of a drink.
Agostino (“Ago”) Perrone is the Director of Mixology at the Connaught Bar. Which is a bit like saying you’re the Captain of Paintings at The Louvre, or the Chief Jesus Officer at The Vatican. It’s the pinnacle of the pinnacle. The top of the top. The Maraschino cherry, perhaps, in the Manhattan of the trade. (Other garnishes, of course, are available.)
The Connaught Bar is the hotel bar all other hotel bars want to be when they grow up. It has twice been given the number one spot by the World’s 50 Best Bar Awards, and has lounged in the top ten every year since 2011. Perrone himself was awarded the Industry Icon Award back in 2022 for his services (and I’m paraphrasing) to exquisite hangovers. So it’s no surprise that Phaidon is about to release The Connaught Bar: Cocktail Recipes and Iconic Creations, a handsome new book about the place, this spring. It’s a recipe book as much as a love letter: ostensibly a guide to recreating 100 of the Connaught’s most beloved cocktails at home. But having spent 45-or-so minutes in their company, I have to say you’d much rather Perrone—or his spiritual deputy Giorgio Bargiani—prepare them for you instead.
This is the funny thing about a cocktail, Bargiani begins. (He and Perrone are sitting in the high-ceilinged pomp of the Connaught Bar on a Friday afternoon in February, the very picture of Savile Row sprezzatura.) “You can have a glass of wine at home. But to have a cocktail you need something else. You need the surroundings to be unique,” he says. “Why do we say cocktail dress, but we never say wine dress? It’s because a cocktail is not just the composition of ingredients in a drink—a cocktail is a mood.”
"We have created an elevation of the art of hospitality, and the art of mixing drinks."
This is the standard register of Perrone, Bargiani, and their ilk—a sort of philosopher-poet lyricism that belies a stark, clinical word like mixology. Yes, these drinks are set out in millimeters and measures. But cocktail-making is far closer, in their hands, to an art than a science.
There are no bar stools, for example, at the Connaught Bar—a fact that Massimo Bottura, himself the artist-king of cooking, notes with curiosity in his adoring introduction to the Phaidon book. It’s because the bar should be a stage, Perrone says. “We have created an elevation of the art of hospitality, and the art of mixing drinks. A stool at the bar would create an extra barrier,” he says—it would block the bright proscenium of the performance. But it’s also because any good bar is almost a dance, a human flow, Bargiani adds. “We allow standing at the bar, because when you’re standing, you look back, you turn around—there is natural movement and interaction. This movement gives a sort of dynamism to everything...”
“...And it’s then that you can connect people,” adds Perrone. “Our job is not just mixing drinks—it’s also to mix people. We know you, but you don’t know each other. And just by a joke or a little anecdote, we can create a new connection,” he says.
Perrone grew up in Puglia, at the southern heel of Italy’s boot. It’s a place that vibrates with disparate influence—historically Roman and architecturally Saracen; but also Norman-French, surprisingly, with flecks of the Aragonese and the Byzantine Empire. (There are still places in Puglia where Greek is spoken alongside Italian, for example.) Any decent hotel bar, he says, has the same magic—that mish-mash of influence and colliding cultures. “It is a true melting pot.” Bargiani agrees: “We have international regulars. They are here every other week, coming back from New York or Hong Kong, and they bring something—their energy, their experience,” he says, “We are both from small cities in Italy. And life there can be a bit repetitive…these stories from outside add a priceless layer to our everyday lives.”
I ask why so many of the great hotel barmen in London are Italian. Alessandro Palazzi at Dukes. Giuliano Morandin at The Dorchester. Antonino Lo Iacono at The Beaumont. Raffaele di Monaco at The Berkeley. “It’s because Italians genuinely like to share things—from the simple things in life to a complex cocktail. We like to talk. We like to listen. That’s how we grow up,” he says. “We don’t need to come from a hospitality family to do this job naturally. When you visit your family at home in Italy there is a sense of hospitality there always—they welcome you, they offer you a chair, they ask you simple things that make you feel instantly comfortable. And we have a sense of palate, and we’re excited to share that.”
Perrone’s own palate blossomed at an early age. “I think back to where I grew up in Puglia, on my very humble farm, with my uncle. I remember playing with my cousin, and we were helping to pick tomatoes in August—and so I have a strong memory of the smell of the tomato, and the tomato leaves. I remember when I would climb the fig trees, and your hands would get dirty with the resin, which was sticky and itchy.”
“I’ve spent 20 years making drinks and traveling the world,” he continues. “My database of experiences and of flavors grow. But I thought—why do I get so emotional sometimes? Perhaps it is my age. But sometimes there is a hint of an aroma that is evocative of a memory from my childhood, and I realized that it was these simple moments in the fields when my brain was setting up the database of what quality is.”
Some cocktails at the Connaught, then, are a hymn to this childhood. (Bargiani’s own eyes go wide when he describes an essential herb, elicriso, used in the Goodfellas cocktail. “On the coast of Tuscany where I’m from, it is the perfume that you smell the most wherever you go...”) But the creations are also made in service of the guests. “We would like them to remember in the future that day in the Connaught Bar when they tried for the first time the Bloody Mary—and there was Giorgio smiling, with the flamboyant gestures, and making the drink for them... We are parts of people’s lives in the end.”
"Something very luxurious is something that’s very personal to you…the martini embraces the lifestyle; it says: I want this my way."
That sense of occasion, of performance, is best observed in the Connaught’s famous martini trolley. This is the lacquered, jingling, heavily laden cart that’s ceremoniously wheeled over to guests by maestro Perrone himself, who often dons a white glove for the act. Crystal cut glasses shimmer against an apothecary of bottles and tinctures. There are probably tens of thousands of possible combinations available, though it would be unwise to try them all. Perrone remembers when Pierce Brosnan—007 incarnate—sat before the trolley and ordered his own take on the martini. “We were shaking like little children with excitement,” he says.
“These days, personalization is associated with luxury,” Bargiani says of the enduring popularity of the drink. “Something very luxurious is something that’s very personal to you. And whenever somebody orders a martini, it’s always with an extra word attached: lemon, olive, gin, vodka, shaken, stirred, wet, dry, extra dry, dirty. The martini embraces the lifestyle; it says: I want this my way, in this moment, in this mood.”
Other drinks come up. We are in a real “aperitivo moment” right now, they say—simple, sleek, provenance-heavy cocktails that evoke the Dolce Vita, like negronis and martinis. But margaritas are also very popular at the moment, along with “agave spirits in general.” They think the trend might soon swing towards the 1990s vogue for fruity, playful cocktails; perhaps some more exuberant, rum-based drinks.
The cocktail dearest to Perrone’s heart, however, is one that helped to put him, and the Connaught, on the map. “The Latina Daisy was on the original menu for the Connaught Bar, and it won a very big competition early on, so it became a little bit of an ‘iconic cocktail of Ago,’” he says. Before social media was really a thing, he remembers, word of the Latina Daisy’s greatness was spread by the fizzing network of international barmen. “It’s still very romantic to me. It’s a drink that first traveled by word of mouth, like the classic cocktails of the past—like the Sazerac, the Hemingway Daiquiri, the Sidecar.”
Where do Perrone and Bargiani find the ideas for new drinks, new creations, I ask? Again, the question is too limiting, somehow; too mercenary. “Whatever you do in life, it’s going to become part of you,” Perrone says. “We go around the world in the best hotels, to the three-star Michelin restaurants, with the ultimate attention to detail and luxury. But at the same time we go to Oaxaca and spend time with an old lady cooking for us who doesn’t speak our language. Both experiences are very powerful, and they become a part of you. And when we come back to work, we translate our own personal experience into storytelling in the form of a cocktail. So inspiration doesn’t just come from ingredients, flavors; it comes at any moment.”
Perrone invented a cocktail one afternoon when staring at the marble floor of the Connaught Bar, for example, gazing at the great foundations on which the rest of the gilded edifice sits. “Everybody tells you to look at the sky to find inspiration,” he says. “But why don’t you look down? Down there is the marble floor where we spend many hours every day. It is underneath our feet. Something like that is a part of us.” So he made a cocktail about it, in the way a singer might sing about it or a writer might write. “And now, I hope, it can become a part of other people, too.”
