Three Sheets

Three Sheets is proof that a great cocktail bar needs almost nothing: no theatre, no vast back bar, no doorman. Brothers Max and Noel Venning opened it in Dalston in 2016 in a small, plainly furnished room, and it entered The World’s 50 Best Bars two years later.

The approach is reductive on purpose. The shelf behind the bar carries a short list of ingredients, many of them made in-house, and the menu is correspondingly brief. Max came up through Tony Conigliaro’s Drink Factory and 69 Colebrooke Row, which is where the technical rigour comes from, but none of it is worn on the sleeve. Drinks arrive looking simple and taste like they took a great deal of work, which they did.

The room is genuinely small and fills quickly, particularly at weekends. It works best early or midweek, when you can sit at the bar and talk to whoever is making the drinks.

The brothers have since opened a second site in Soho, which landed at number eighty on the 2025 list, so central London is now an option if Dalston is a trek.

Our verdict: the most quietly accomplished cocktail bar in east London. Order whatever is shortest on the menu; the restraint is the skill.

Go if: you want serious drinks with zero ceremony. Skip if: you want a big room or a big group.

Go early. Dalston Lane, E8. Second site in Soho.