NOTE: The Southsider Cocktail Club has sadly now closed. But if you like mixed drinks, you might just be interested in The Best Cocktail Bars in London…
Today we’d like to discuss extraordinary cocktails.
Which cost less than they should.
The starting point for our conversation, and please feel free to interject whenever you like, begins with the following rule:
In London, it’s expensive to buy extraordinary cocktails.
And now, an exception to the rule: The Southsider Cocktail Club.
Enveloped by black slate, red booths and Keith Haring-inspired street art on the walls, Head Barman Alex Clark has created an innovative cocktail list that raises the mixology stakes to (almost) Blumenthal levels of experimentation, and you needn’t break the bank to try them.
The majority of his cocktails’ bizarre ingredients – from tobacco mist and bacon powder to Chartreuse meringues and dehydrated raspberries – are homemade. Additionally the bar brews its own South Cider and ginger beer, and infuses spirits in order to create oddities like Bacon Bourbon.
You’ll have trouble choosing a drink, but the Blueberry Pancake Mule (dreamed up while watching Pulp Fiction and drinking a Moscow Mule, as you do) – which combines vanilla vodka, SSCC’s Blueberry vermouth and tea pot bitters, plus a ginger brandy snap and cream – is pretty special.
Equally the Harry Potter-inspired Butterbeer tastes almost exactly how you might have hoped it would, only creamier, beerier, butterscotchier and, um, honey-ier.
It’s also worth noting that if you fancy something a little more normal, then The Bloody Warhol isn’t for you either, containing – as it does – beef jerky-infused vodka and chicken salt served up in a Campbell’s soup tin….
NOTE: The Southsider Cocktail Club has sadly now closed. But if you like mixed drinks, you might just be interested in The Best Cocktail Bars in London…
The Southsider Cocktail Club | 56 Battersea Rise, SW11 1EJ