Always a nice feeling to be right. On Monday evening, having been befuddled by a place called Negroni’s — I’d expected a bar specialising in Italian classics and was somehow wrong — I poured myself down Frith Street, onto Old Compton Street and headed for a glass-and-brass lined room called Swift. “It’s pretty good, this place,” I told my friend. Just so; yesterday the news came that it had clocked in at No 2 on this year’s Top 50 Cocktail Bars list, a UK-only catalogue. It was beaten to gold by Cardiff’s Lab 22, which I happen to have been to and frankly think is too neon by half.
Swift proves a worthy London winner. It’s a looker, cocktails are roughly a tenner — about half the price of a drink in our typical, dishonourably overpriced hotel bars — and service is, well, swift. The bar, though, is just one of the capital’s treasures: out of the 50, we claimed half, skewed towards the deep end (of the top 20, 15 are here). It speaks to a city that merrily jingles with the sound of ice rattling in a shaker, which is testament to a change over the past decade or so that’s seen London fall for doing things properly and out of love with the post-work chains and their fishbowls of fluorescent gloop, places where it was never certain whether the buzz came from the booze or the industrial quantities of sugar invariably used. Now we have the likes of Old Street’s keenly innovative Tayer + Elementary (No 4), with drinks distinctly unlike anywhere else and all the better for it, or Islington’s Homeboy (14), where cocktails are familiar, they just happen to be better than everywhere else. Don’t skip The Connaught (3) or whisky-dive Satan’s Whiskers (5) either.
