Molecular Cocktails at Hush

I am always a little wary of using the term ‘mixologist’; a title a lot of bartenders insist on being addressed as.

Maybe it’s just snobbery on my part but for me, the idea that there is some sort of science behind making a good cosmopolitan or French martini is a little hard to swallow.

However, for the people behind the molecular cocktails at Hush, they can call themselves whatever they damn want; mixologist, designer or artist, because although not all of their creations work, when they get it right, it’s a thing of beauty.

Improving something often means taking it apart, seeing its constituent parts and then putting it all back together with better ingredients or fresh ideas. That is the thinking of the people at Hush who have come up with a new series of cocktails using techniques previously applied to food.

Many will have heard of Heston Blumenthal and his penchant for reducing dishes to a foam. Now the same thing is being applied to a mojito. Using gelatine, all the ingredients of a mojito, which are rum, mint and sugar syrup, are bound together and then reconstituted as a foam. It’s just as well as it does not translate brilliantly, with the harshness of the mint coming through too strongly, as I would probably be gorging myself non-stop in the same manner as I often do with whipped cream.

The divide between cocktail and dessert has always been a narrow one and the serving of a pear and cinnamon sorbet straddles that line quite neatly. It is well-balanced with neither flavour dominating the other. However, the creation that is the acme of Hush’s work is the Pina Caipirola. Incorporating calcium membranes, rum and all the flavours normally found in an orthodox Pina Colada, this is something magnificent. Rum is injected into a calcium buffer to create rum caviar, small balls filled with the spirit. On a bed of the sorbet featuring all of a Pina Colada’s flavours, the rum caviar sits, waiting to be burst and to combine with everything else and then slip down your throat. It really is quite exquisite and brilliantly thought through.

At £8.50 per drink, you may not be able to sample all of the creations but given the amount of research that has gone into producing them, they are well worth your time and money.

Hush
8 Lancashire Court
Brook Street
Mayfair
W1S 1EY

Tel: 020 7659 1500