Cocktails with colourful tastes

I’m lucky enough to go to lots of new drinks businesses around London and the UK. It’s my job (hard life, etc). While I waited for my date outside Cato in Covent Garden, I realised it was the first cocktail bar opening I’d been excited about for a long time. In fact, ina city with such a fêted cocktail history, I’ve been to very few recent openings dedicated to their celebration.

In the past year, most of the new openings I’ve heard about have been wine bars. They’re seen as approachable, whereas cocktail bars are often seen as more exclusive, more of a special-occasion destination than a casual third space, suitable for spontaneous drop-ins. Which got me thinking: with this resurgence of the wine bar, alongside the interest in pubs, how is cocktail culture evolving to meet the needs of a modern, younger audience?

If anyone has the answer, it’s Angelos Bafas, co-owner of Cato (named for Cato Alexander – freedman, first celebrity mixologist, 1780-1858). I’ve been following Bafas’s work for a few years, and am an enormous fan of his sourcing-first approach to building drinks, where a pared-back simplicity belies a cunningness and attention to detail.

At Cato, he oversees three bars: House of Julep is the one you enter from the street, then there’s Cato’s Study upstairs, but I was most intrigued by the basement room. This is the concept most reflective of Bafas’s style, and I anticipate it will be the most popular. The menu is called Colour Has Flavour, and is inspired by synaesthesia, so cocktails are split into coloured categories – Green, White, Pink and so on. It sounds high-concept, but in typical Bafas style, nothing could be simpler.

There are no lurid colours, no bell jars filled with smoke, no goldleaf-adorned kumquats. The focus is on ingredients and provenance, which I think will be a key thing to separate a new, successful cocktail bar from the rest – fascination with ingredients and sense of place. On the menu at Cato, there’s South Devon jalapeño liquor, Norfolk shiso, Cornish rosé vermouth and quince eau de vie from Capreolus Distillery. Herbs are grown on-site. “This is more than a concept,” Bafas says. “We believe it’s the only way for a bar to be in 2026.”

That’s to say, a modern cocktail bar needs to be an approachable, welcoming space that puts an emphasis on old-school hospitality. “The industry is focusing on awards or trying to create new experiences,” he says. “But I think we need to focus on how we can take this kind of hospitality into the present day.”

The popularity of the wine bar is probably to do with its casual nature. You don’t need to dress up to go there, making it perfect for a spontaneous evening. Offering a more casual cocktail spot, like Cato, may be a new angle we see other places taking. Cocktail bars are for more than high-stakes occasions, they’re also for life’s smaller, more informal moments.