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Straight Up: Untitled

Waif. Snow. Gonzo. Ghost. The cocktail list of many bars might revel in elaborate, descriptive - even puntastic names but Untitled offers a starker read. Instead the shrink-wrapped list is a spare, understated column of 12 singular words with ingredients such as clay, silica or beeswax written beneath, with nary a spirit between them. But then this is no ordinary bar - this will, for many, be a pilgrimage of pure flavour.

Untitled, in the hipsterville strip of Dalston’s Kingsland Road is the third bar by revolutionary (to borrow from his friend and oft-time collaborator Heston Blumenthal) drinks maestro Tony Conigliaro and his Drink Factory team.

Beardie, beanie-hatted, with a tattoo on one finger, Tony C looks very much home in his arresting sparse new space which takes its cues from Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory. A hefty 1.5 ton slab of polished concrete appears to float down its centre like a giant banqueting table overseen by the head of Pan and spotlit by industrial Flos lighting.

Glinting foil-lined walls are warmed up by the skin tones of large-scale nude photography by Benny Robinson, aka Machine17, that casually lean, studio-like, against the walls. He was also responsible for the cool graphics of Untitled, which include Duke Western-style shirts covered in “stick and poke” tattoo motifs and fun trompe l’oeil coasters.

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The minimal proscenium frames of the street facade hint that this is a creative showcase of sorts. “It’s definitely going to be the most experimental of my bars,” Conigliaro says, “Bar Termini in Soho is a kind of idealised version of Italy. 69 Colebrooke Row is creative, but here at Untitled things are likely to change every four months, including the drinks.”

Back to those drinks. “Their names are representative of the taste - we want to close that gap between the indicator and flavour,” he explains. “We don’t declare everything that’s in them because it limits the customer. We want to open people’s eyes and palate, we want it to be challenging.”

Drinking at Untitled is not dissimilar to dining at Fera. Not in the sense of the surroundings (the former is more East Village early Eighties Blondie pop video rather than the glam splendour of Claridge's), but each time an intriguing new order arrives it becomes sole focus - and you'll want to embrace the spirit of sharing.

Vessels are particular to each cocktail; Violin, a deep amber, is delivered in a glass echoing the instrument’s silhouette, while Tomato, inspired by Campbell’s Soup is served in a white china cup, meanwhile the citrus-flavoured Sicily comes in coupe topped by a layer of African marigold petals.  

Conigliaro has been known to spend a year or more developing a drink in his lab, using methods that marry perfumery, science and cooking - using blowtorches, bain maries, centrifuges, vacuum sealers and – his favourite – the Buchi Rotavapor: a tabletop vacuum distillation unit which allows ingredients to be distilled at low temperatures, thus garnering a cleaner final result.

He may be a geeky and precise, but the true brilliance of Conigliaro lies in his renaissance approach, art-school trained inspiration comes  in many forms. He describes Violin as a “diorama of the sounds and making of a violin” (while also referencing world-famous violinist Jascha Heifetz), it has a vodka base but they looked to whisky for the working formula. Ingredients include oak, pine, beeswax, benzoin and black pepper - it has resinous notes but tastes like a sophisticated cognac that grows sweeter and more mellow in the mouth. “We know it works,” he says, “because it reminded our operations manager of growing up and his mum restores violins.”

Other surefire hits are going to be Gonzo (Conigliaro’s utterly moreish reinvention of the margarita), a silky, tequila-based concoction including distillations of caramel, buckwheat and musky ambrette that’s served in a small earthenware tumbler.

Also the poetic Snow - the combination of distilled clay, chalk and enoki designed to capture that mineral, wet concrete feeling of “running outside and catching a snowflake in your mouth”. His co-partner in Untitled and head of research, Zoe Burgess discovered the missing baronial note to complete that particular creation. “She was in Norway travelling and I got a text at 2am that just read ‘snow=enoki mushrooms’,” he recalls.

Untitled includes a dining area which we didn’t experience, choosing instead a few bar snacks which turned out to be a highbrow relation to the common crisp with flavours such as wasabi, tomato quavers and sesame with seaweed. We were also presented with a taster on arrival. Resembling a rose petal on petri dish, this edible gel infused with beetroot and rose essence melted on the tongue turning to a gum-like substance before disappearing.

It's name? "A wish", but by any other name it would taste as sweet. Conigliaro's bar may be called Untitled, but it's unlikely to remain unknown.
538 Kingsland Road, Hackney, E8 4AH; untitled-bar.com