Archive & Myth.

Archive & Myth

The house martini is a half-size pour of Renais gin with limestone, Chablis and lemon oils, and Renais is a company Jack Sotti part-owns, which is worth knowing before you order it. CLASS's Hamish Smith drank it anyway and rated the drinks 9 out of 10: It's got just-fallen rain notes, it's flinty and bracing.1

Why go

Sotti was crowned World Class Bartender of the Year in Australia and placed third globally, owned and ran Boilermaker House and Eau de Vie in Melbourne, spent a year visiting eighty bars around the world, then went to Diageo as Tanqueray brand ambassador and later head of brand advocacy for the UK. What that pedigree buys here is a list of rebuilt historical recipes rather than inventions: Singani with sugarcane, cut grass and hops in a Queen's Park, vodka with sherry, fermented lychee and palo santo in a Bamboo, brandy with laminated pastry and egg custard in a Sazerac de Nata that arrives with a cured quail's yolk. There is a separate vintage list poured from genuinely old bottles, including a Dry Gin Martini built on 1950s Beefeater and 1960s Martini Extra Dry. The bar's own stated specialism is ultra-cold freezer martinis "built for precision, texture and clarity." It landed on the UK Top 50 Cocktail Bars list for 2025, voted by an industry academy and run by The Morning Advertiser, and it was nominated for New Bar of the Year at the 2025 CLASS Bar Awards.

Order this / avoid

• Order: the Martini Mineraux as a Minor, the half-size at GBP 11, which is also how you drink here without the bill escalating. Smith's line on it: What the halfling lacks in size, it makes up for in character.1 Then the Bamboo, which in his words foams out of its coupe and manages to be low-down funky and high brow at the same time. Order the salt and pepper prawns from Chop Chop to slow things down.
• Avoid: letting the tab run. Smith scored value 5 out of 10 and reported GBP 150 on pre-dinner drinks and nibbles. Also avoid arriving without a booking, since the way in is the Magic Mike Live entrance off Cranbourn Street, then the door to the left of the lift, and it opens on a code at your reservation time.

What locals & experts say

• Hamish Smith, CLASS (16 October 2024), total 7 out of 10, with drinks at 9: The drinks are restorations of dusty recipes, with just the right amount of new complementing the old. They take the black and white and make them colour. His verdict: In drinks, hospitality and atmosphere, this is a fine cocktail bar that could rub shoulders with the best indies around.1
• Hamish Smith, the dissent, same review: The bits that let it down are the charmless surroundings, the eye-rolling entrance and the tourist-trap prices (GBP 150 on pre-dinner drinks and nibbles!), which are perhaps the elements that Sotti and team have had the least part in. You don't, I suppose, choose your parents. His sub-scores were hospitality 8, food 7, atmosphere 8, decor 7 and value 5.1
• UK Top 50 Cocktail Bars 2025 (The Morning Advertiser), announced 6 December 2024: listed as Archive & Myth, Leicester Square, London among the fifty, on a programme first launched in 2018 and voted for by an academy of industry experts. The announcement was alphabetical, so no placing is known.2
• CLASS Bar Awards 2025: nominated in the New Bar of the Year category, per the bar's own press list. A nomination, not a win.
• Local rec: a bartender sent Jeff here. REAL.

Good to know

• Getting in: at your booking time, use the Magic Mike Live entrance to the Hippodrome off Cranbourn Street, take the door to the left of the lift, and go downstairs. There is a code. Smith could not work the door and needed the foyer attendant to bang on it for him.
• Booking: essential, through the bar's SevenRooms page.
• Prices: the menu runs in two sizes, Minor and Major. Minor was GBP 11 and Major GBP 19 on the Top 50 profile, while Smith paid GBP 22 for full-size drinks in October 2024. Neither figure is confirmed for 2026.
• Food: a short list sent from Chop Chop next door, including salt and pepper prawns and vegetarian dumplings with chili oil.
• The room: exposed brick, soft furnishings, low light, and memorabilia drawn from the building's history.
• Also: the bar runs Dry January takeovers where guest bartenders build alcohol-free versions of the signature drinks.
• Dietary: nothing published by the bar.
• Hygiene: the bar has no FSA record of its own, which fits a venue whose food comes from elsewhere. Chop Chop, which supplies it, holds a rating of 5 at the Hippodrome, last inspected 17 January 20255.

Craft signals (cocktails: guest takeovers and a restoration programme)

Two signals. The bar runs Dry January takeovers with guest bartenders building alcohol-free versions of their own signatures, a guest-shift programme with a date on it. The second is the list itself, built as restorations of historical recipes with named modern additions, plus a vintage bottle list and a stated freezer-martini discipline, which CLASS scored 9 out of 10. A programme of guests over a research-driven list is the cadence; the casino it sits under is not.

Jeff's take (his words)

• Note: "Bartender rec" REAL. The bartender is unnamed on his list, which is worth filling in, because an industry rec for this bar would sit alongside a CLASS review that scored the drinks 9 out of 10.

Verdict

should-visit — Worth the detour for the drinks and nothing else, which is roughly what CLASS concluded. Jack Sotti built the list, and he was World Class Bartender of the Year in Australia, ran Boilermaker House and Eau de Vie in Melbourne, spent a year visiting eighty bars around the world, and is now a partner in Renais Spirits, whose gin goes into the half-size Martini Mineraux with limestone, Chablis and lemon oils. Hamish Smith scored the drinks 9 out of 10 and wrote that they 'take the black and white and make them colour', while scoring value 5 and naming the tourist-trap prices, the charmless Leicester Square surroundings and the entrance pantomime as what drags it down. The house specialism is ultra-cold freezer martinis and a vintage list poured from 1950s Beefeater and 1960s vermouth. It made the UK Top 50 Cocktail Bars 2025. Go for two drinks, know the food is Chop Chop's, and watch the tab.