Tayer + Elementary

Tayer + Elementary is the bar that changed what a London cocktail bar is allowed to look like. Monica Berg and Alex Kratena opened it on Old Street in June 2019, and it debuted on The World’s 50 Best Bars at number five the following year before climbing to number two in 2022. For a bar barely three years old at the time, that was close to unprecedented.

The format is two rooms with two different jobs, which is the thing most people get wrong before they arrive. Elementary, at the front, is the all day room: bright, informal, no booking, drinks built fast and well. Tayer, at the back, is the serious one, a circular bar counter where the drinks are made in front of you and the menu changes constantly. The name comes from taller, Spanish for workshop, and the room is run like one.

Kratena ran Artesian at The Langham when it was named the best bar in the world, so the pedigree here is not accidental. What is unusual is how little ceremony there is about it. There is no dress code worth worrying about, no doorman, no theatre. The ambition is entirely in the glass, and the room is deliberately plain so that nothing distracts from it.

Our verdict: the most influential bar in London of the last decade, and still the one other bartenders talk about. If you care about what is actually in the drink rather than the room it is served in, this is the address.

Go if: you want serious, inventive drinking without any of the grandeur. Skip if: you are after plush surroundings or a hotel-bar hush.

Walk in to Elementary at the front. Book if you want the Tayer counter. Old Street, EC1.