Lyaness: Exclusive first taste of Ryan Chetiyawardana's new cocktail bar

London's cocktail king: Ryan Chetiyawardana is set to open his new bar Lyaness at Sea Containers Hotel on the Southbank next week
Daniel Hambury/@stellapicsltd
Alice Lascelles27 March 2019

When Ryan Chetiyawardana heard the news last October that his bar, Dandelyan, had been voted number one by the World’s 50 Best Bars website, he did what anyone would do. He posted the news on social media and had a right old knees-up. Then he continued with his plan to close it down.

It seemed perverse at the time — this panoramic Thameside cocktail bar had attracted a slew of awards for its ingenious botanical recipes, and was regularly shifting 1,000 drinks a night. But the eternally restless 34-year-old felt the concept had run its course. “The landscape and the conversation has shifted,” he said on Instagram. “It makes sense to burn it down and start afresh.”

This week Chetiyawardana unveils its successor, Lyaness. It’s in the same location, at Sea Containers London on the South Bank. The 21-drink menu is themed around seven house-made ingredients which champion different flavours, including banana, peanut and raspberry.

Some of these ingredients are boozy cordials, others are spirits. One or two are non-alcoholic. And each one is showcased in three different drinks. “Instead of being led by recipes, we’re being led by flavour,” says Chetiyawardana. “I think of it as a cook’s approach to cocktails.”

Infinite Banana is a cordial made from bananas that have been cured, fermented and generally mucked about with in order to capture as many flavour facets as possible. This comes in a trio of cocktails — a tiki drink, a Martinez and an Americano — which are by turns smoky, spicy and sweet.

King Monkey Nut — a pungent syrup made with peanuts and coriander seed — lends a sweet and savoury Thai note to a spritz. Ultra Raspberry adds a fruity pop to a Bellini spiked with tequila.

Mixing it up: Chetiyawardana outside new bar Lyaness, in the former site of Dandelyan
Daniel Hambury/@stellapicsltd

There are drinks within drinks. The Lyaness Highball is made with a whisky which was specially created for the bar by maverick Scotch whisky blender Compass Box, to evoke the flavours of an Old Fashioned.

Then there’s the deeply-weird Onyx, a spirit that was developed in collaboration with the out-there Danish distillery Empirical Spirits (famous for making a jalepeño spirit called F*** Trump and His F****** Wall). Flavoured with koji, maple wood, birch, hibiscus and hops, and aged in walnut, Onyx is the colour of rhubarb cordial, smells like umami, yet when it’s served in a Daiquiri tastes inexplicably like chocolate.

Chetiyawardana — or Mr Lyan, as he’s more commonly known — has form when it comes to weird concepts. His first cocktail bar, White Lyan in Shoreditch, banned all perishable ingredients including fresh fruit and ice, as well as plastic straws. People laughed when it opened in 2014 but a lot of the ideas it raised — particularly about sustainability and waste — have now become commonplace in the bar world.

Its award-winning successor, Cub, on the same site — a restaurant/bar hybrid collaboration with zero-waste chef Doug McMaster — set out to prove that luxury and sustainability needn’t be mutually exclusive. And he was one of the first high-profile bartenders to take non-alcoholic cocktails seriously, too.

“I love going into a classic hotel bar and having a perfect martini,” says Chetiyawardana. “But people don’t come to us for that. Half of our guests can probably mix a great cocktail already, so this is about giving them the opportunity to explore things that they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, at home. To make them feel more excited about going out to bars, but also making drinks themselves.”

The reason Chetiyawardana can do all this intellectualising and still sell 1,000 drinks a night, and get Björk behind the decks and Beyoncé partying in the basement, is that his bars are also a lot of fun. And he’s determined that the electric-blue Lyaness — which is being furnished by the man who designed Dandelyan’s luxe interior, Jacu Strauss — should be the same. “We want it to feel bright and energetic and buzzy, like a really great house party.”

If you’d prefer to order a plain old G&T at Lyaness, he’s cool with that. But I must say, if you did, I think you’d be missing a trick.

Bookings can be made by phone, email, or online: 020 3747 1063, lyaness@seacontainerslondon.com. For more information, visit lyaness.com.

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