It was World Martini Day on Saturday June 17. It is Brummell Drinks Club’s Martini Day roughly once a week. Thankfully, some bars take the clear classic seriously year-round, including the likes of Dukes, the Connaught and Vesper at the Dorchester. We can now add Swans Bar at Maison Assouline on Piccadilly to that select list.

Maison Assouline is the flagship of the Assouline luxury publishing company, famous for its enormous, stylish tomes on travel and cultural phenomena. But heaven forfend you call them coffee-table books – even if they are the size of a modest piece of furniture. The store opened nearly 10 years ago in a stately Edwin Lutyens-designed building, as a cultural salon, events venue and home for various objets from around the world.

Swans Bar itself has become a more important part of the activities under the influence of Alex Assouline (son of founders Prosper and Martine), who is now COO, and the Maison’s new director James Duncan. One of their first acts was to hire Gabor Onufer, formerly of Claridge’s, as head bartender.

The name Swans refers to Truman Capote’s label for a circle of high-society women, who probably regarded themselves as his friends until he skewered them in his short story in Esquire: La Côte Basque. They are depicted in happier times on the walls of the bar.

As well as a regular cocktail list, which the martini list will augment, there is an ever-evolving Travel Menu, where each highly crafted cocktail reflects one of Assouline’s lavish destination guides. In some instances, the recipe is a natural response (such as the Tulum Gypset, which combines mezcal and silver tequila with cacao nibs and spicy rosita de cacao flowers, rambutan and chilli). In some instances, Onufer has had to think more laterally to represent the moon and the metaverse. For the latter he has combined Glenmorangie whisky, Midori (the melon liqueur’s rehabilitation starts here!), bitter chinotto, eucalyptus and buchu (an African bush whose leaves are minty, with a blackcurrant-like acidity) to create a flavour that appears unreal. Appropriately, a few Metaverse cocktails will leave you legless.

Onufer’s martini menu too is possibly more traditionally Swan-worthy: classy originals, elevated with interesting choices of ingredient (but no faux-martinis such as espresso et al). The Dirty Gibson is made with Hepple gin (arguably the best martini gin around), Dolin Dry vermouth and honey-balsamic onions; while a sea-influenced vodka martini uses X Muse (with its distinctive subtle barley notes) which has been kombu butter-washed, with Mancino Dry vermouth, garnished with coastal oyster leaf and Nocellara olives.

Onufer uses techniques at Swans bar that you would expect from a bar with a much bigger back-of-house – he has a lab squeezed into the tiny available prep space. One process he specialises in is “switching”. Using what amounts to freeze-distillation, he extracts the water from the alcohol in fortified wines and switches them. Of course, part of the flavour remains in the alcohol, part of it in the water, so that creates hybrids, such as Dolin Dry vermouth, with its herbaceous botanical notes, with some deep woody notes from the “sherry water”.

This “Sherry water-switched Dolin Dry” is an ingredient in Swans’ “ultimate” Eau de Martini, made from ultra-premium Seventy One gin (which is constructed like a perfume) and quinquina. It is served with caviar, hence the £70 price tag. Which makes it easier to avoid irresponsible drinking, as described by a writer every bit as waspish as Capote, namely, Dorothy Parker: “I like to have a martini/ Two at the very most/ Three – I’m under the table/ Four – I’m under the host.”

maisonassouline.com