Moodily-lit: the Tom Dixon-designed bar
(Picture: Julian Abrams)Three of London’s top bartenders are teaming up to open a new late-night bar next month.
Silverleaf is set for a February launch on the top floor of Devonshire House, part of the Pan Pacific London — the five-star, Liverpool Street outpost of the celebrated Singaporean hotel group — and will stay open until 2am every night of the week.
The project has been put together with the help of Martyn “Simo” Simpson, owner of the long-standing Milroy’s in Soho; his former director of bars Chris Tanner; and Liam Broom, who previously managed Callooh Callay, the idiosyncratic cocktail spot that helped revive Shoreditch in the late Noughties. Tanner will become the bar’s general manager, Broom the bar manager, while Simpson has helped put together the bar’s menu and spirit selection.
The Tom Dixon-designed bar is, they say, “inspired by naturalism and the elements” and its approach will veer away from that of a classic American hotel bar. Cocktails will each be built around a handful of core ingredients, tending towards be a mix of usual and unusual. These will include a Martini made with vodka and dry vermouth stirred up with heartleaf and something called “seaside distillate”, a homemade, cold-distilled kombu. Elsewhere is a Grape + Spruce, where whisky comes with grape skin, birch and spruce, or the Watermelon + Umami, where gin is mixed with watermelon, umami vermouth and sake.
Some ingredients will made by the bar itself, while the spirits used suggest the bar is leaning heavily into Japanese producers, particularly whiskies and vodkas from Japanese distilling giant Suntory, and bitters from Yuki Yamazaki’s Japanese Bitters company. This is likely intended to reflect the style of drink and spirit sometimes found in Singapore; the two countries trade frequently.
Tanner said of the project: “When the opportunity arose to open a cocktail bar in partnership with Pan Pacific London, we leapt at the chance, as it has allowed us a new channel for creativity.
“We’ve taken the elements that we know work — curation, hospitality, and training — and applied them to a diverse cocktail offering, opening up the possibilities of what we’re able to do away from whisky.”
Besides the main bar itself, which will have views over the next-door Bishopsgate Plaza, Silverleaf will also house a smaller, 12-seater spot called Alba, which will be used primarily for private drinks events, though it will also act as a bottle-keep for customers to store spirits bought from the bar.
