Since discovering Dover Yard at Cocktails in the City this summer we have been hanging out there day and night for coffee, cocktails, business meetings and nights out.
One Hotels is a young hotel business described as sustainable sanctuaries that bring nature indoors to create places of rest and relaxation. As you walk into the hotel lobby the sounds of falling rain instantly make you feel relaxed, the reception desk is a weathered, solid oak tree trunk which fell during a storm and there are plants everywhere.
However it is the service and people that really make it somewhere you want to stay and spend some time. We caught up with Matteo Carretta the Director of Bars at One Hotel Mayfair for a catch up.
After spending 4 years at Claridge’s, which is regarded as one of the finest hotels in the world why did you decide to move?
Claridge’s is a great institution that believes in the importance of continually improving and staying on top of changing fashions, so it had to be special to make the move.
The style and vision of One Hotels really resonated with me; the company embraces a less formal, more personal style of service that really empowers the staff to be themselves.
Traditionally five-star has been associated with grandeur, opulence, a more formal style of service, this is not the experience at One Hotel.
What is the one thing you must enjoy about the new business?
The main one for me is the service we provide. Whilst we have a great bar team at Dover Yard and the drinks are exceptional, the focus is on consistency of product and empowering the staff to be genuine to who they are and not simply follow a script.
We’ve employed an experienced management team who were selected for their empathy and enthusiasm for working inside the operation. On any service we will have two managers available, and they can jump in and cover anyone’s role if required. For example, a bartender might be developing a great rapport with the guest at the bar who wants to see one of the hotel rooms, the bartender could continue that relationship, show the guest the hotel and one of the managers can jump in behind the bar.
Having popped up at Cocktails in the City it would be remiss not to ask you about the cocktail list………
We wanted the drinks menu to be simple and easy to understand. Our bar team can talk at great length about the ingredients and processes that go into making the cocktails but we won’t force it on people, the elaborate mise en place is hidden from the guest. One Hotels are focussed around sustainability and seasonality and so both of these two values are reflected in the drinks list.
The discarded section repurposes ingredients used elsewhere in the hotel, croissants, coffee grounds, tea leaves etc. We ferment the tea leaves, infuse the coffee grounds and the unused croissants.
A number of signature cocktails also adapt as the seasons change. We will order in a lot of fruit at the peak of its season, preserve it and then serve it up in our drinks, for examples the Cherries we preserved in summer were served up in our Autumnal menu.
The Pain Brioche Cocktail
Pastries are a big daily waste in hotels, and so we decided to make a croissant falernum to use in a signature drink. Starting from plain croissant we dry and powder them to guarantee precise measurement, that is blended with demerara sugar, toasted almonds and other ingredients to get to a thick and buttery orgeat. With that we add alcohol and other flavours to create a mix that is more spiced and similar to a classic falernum, but with lemon instead of lime because it works better with whisky.
We use some xanthan gum to make sure the mix will blend with our whisky of choice, Lakes the One. Finally when we filter the mix we have a spiced croissant paste that we add to a dough and use to bake cute tiny croissants that become the garnish to the drink.
We also like to hero drinks that have become less fashionable within cocktail circles and have been poorly treated over the years, a great example of this is the bramble.
The Rookie Bramble stays on our menu throughout the year but the ingredients alter with the seasons. At Dover Yar we serve it with Boatyard Gin who also have a strong sustainable focus and we use seasonal berries at all of our sites around the world. Before we opened One Mayfair we ran a campaign on the bramble across all of our hotel bars worldwide raising enough money to plant 1,000 trees in London before we had opened the doors.
Having spent time in New York and London, are there any key differences you notice?
In the UK I feel like a lot of the focus for guests is on the venue aesthetic and the product it delivers, whether that be food or drink. In the US it tends to be the server who is the most important focus, customers form close bonds with their host. We have that US style focus on the service, we want our guests to really know our team, like a good neighbourhood bar.
This has also affected some of our decisions on design and presentation. Our glassware is simple, understated but quality. We want people to feel their experience, something internal and not to simply focus on the externals, a crystal glass or oversized stemware for example.
And finally we always like to ask our interviewees for a cocktail they recommend for people to enjoy at home?
For me The Manhattan is a great drink and easy to make it home. Served perfectly with equal parts sweet and dry vermouth to two parts whiskey with a dash of angostura bitters. I like the fact the garnish has a great effect on the experience, choose a cherry, orange or lemon twist will really affect your experience. It can be batched easily, just don’t forget to add some dilution with filtered water, think 2:1:0.5 whiskey, vermouth, water as a rough guideline plus bitters.
Catch the team at Dover Yard, morning, day or night and we recommend the Pain Brioche cocktail, it’s delicious, tell them Cocktails in the City sent you x
