Lyaness
In October 2024 The Pinnacle Guide gave Lyaness the first three-pin award it had ever issued, out of an inaugural list of 37 bars in which twelve reached two pins and nobody reached three (The Spirits Business).
Why go
The menu is organized by ingredients the bar makes itself. An edition runs on five of them across fifteen drinks, with names like tree caramel, everything vinegar, death bitters and Thunder Mushroom, and the back of the menu explains what each one is (UK Top 50 Cocktail Bars). The World's 50 Best Bars describes Thunder Mushroom as grains, legumes and koji spores fermented, fortified and then zapped by a car battery
(50 Best). The Spirits Business credits the bar with parallel fermentation and cryogenics. So the way to order is to say what flavors you like and let a bartender build to them, which the venue asks you to do outright.
Ryan Chetiyawardana runs it, and this is the room where his Dandelyan took World's Best Bar before he closed it in 2019 and reopened the site under a new name. Lore Design put an electric blue palette around Dandelyan's original green marble bar, which is still there. Sea Containers sits on the South Bank with the Thames outside.
The record cuts both ways and both halves belong here. Tales of the Cocktail gave Lyaness World's Best Bar at the 2022 Spirited Awards, and the UK Top 50 Cocktail Bars ranks it 25 and named it Highest Climber in 2025. The World's 50 Best Bars placed it 39th in 2019 and has not carried it in the top 50 since, missing both 2024 and 2025.
Order this / avoid
- Order: the Multi Milk, a milk punch built on bourbon, milk vodka and Thunder Mushroom. The Elephant Martini if the menu still runs it, gin and vodka with hyraceum and a Thunder Mushroom vermouth. Otherwise describe the flavors you want and hand the decision over, because that is how the list is designed to be read.
- Avoid: weekday afternoons, when the doors do not open until 5pm. Coming in wanting a classic list, which is what the weekday happy hour is for. And read the bill: 13.5 percent discretionary service is added.
What locals & experts say
- The Pinnacle Guide, October 2024, on why it broke its own ceiling. Co-founder Dan Dove, quoted in the drinks trade:
There was a resounding consensus from our assessors and reviewers that Lyaness embodied a meticulous, yet effortless sense of hospitality.
The guide assesses on an application plus anonymous reviews, and its co-founder Siobhan Payne had earlier explained that the first list carried no three-pin bars because some scored three on one axis and not the other.1 - UK Top 50 Cocktail Bars, ranking it 25 and naming it Highest Climber 2025:
The bar's cocktails are driven by the team's desire to source and use unusual ingredients, merging the alien and weird into something the delicious.
3 - The World's 50 Best Bars, on the handover from Dandelyan:
Disappointment over World's Best Bar winner Dandelyan's closure has changed to glee at the opening of its successor, Lyaness.
On the method:combining science and blue-sky thinking to craft truly unique serves.
4 - Tales of the Cocktail, 2022: World's Best Bar and Best International Hotel Bar in the same year, in a Spirited Awards where London took five of the eight international categories.2
- What is missing: no critic, chef or working bartender has been found on the record about this bar. Every voice above is an award body or the venue. For a room this decorated that gap is worth naming.
Good to know
- Where: Sea Containers London, 20 Upper Ground SE1 9PD. Blackfriars or Southwark tube, and a short walk along the river from the National Theatre.
- Timing: Monday to Thursday 5pm to midnight, Friday 4pm to 1am, Saturday 1pm to 1am, Sunday 1pm to midnight. Happy hour runs weekdays 5pm to 7pm with small plates alongside.
- Booking: recommended, and the bar says walk-ins are welcome subject to space.
- Age: 18 and over from 5pm. Hotel guests aged 16 and over are admitted with an adult.
- Money: around USD 20 a cocktail by 50 Best's reckoning, and a discretionary 13.5 percent service charge is added to the bill.
- Hygiene: the bar carries no FSA registration of its own. The hotel record covering the premises, Sea Containers London, FHRSID 714779, holds rating 5 from 18 March 2025 with zero points lost on hygiene, structure or confidence in management.6
- Sites: one bar, and a group behind it. Mr Lyan also runs Mr Lyan Studio, Super Lyan, Cub and Seed Library, plus Silver Lyan in Washington DC, which took two pins in the same 2024 announcement. Reviews of any of those are about a different room.
Jeff's take (his words)
- Open question for him: he lists St. JOHN Bar as an exemplar for informal, unstuffy drinking with a point of view. Lyaness has the point of view and the technique and sits in a hotel at three dollar signs. Whether that trade is one he wants made is his call, not ours.
Verdict
must-visit — Plan around it, and go for the ingredients rather than the view. Lyaness is the only bar in the world holding three pins from The Pinnacle Guide, awarded in October 2024 out of an inaugural list where twelve bars managed two and nobody managed three. It took World's Best Bar at the 2022 Spirited Awards. The reason is method: each menu edition is built on a handful of ingredients the team makes in house, and they are genuinely strange, a fermented koji preparation called Thunder Mushroom that The World's 50 Best Bars describes as 'fermented, fortified and then zapped by a car battery', a tree caramel, an everything vinegar. The trade credits the bar with parallel fermentation and cryogenics. You order by telling somebody what flavors you like and letting them build to it, which is a different transaction from reading a list. The counter-evidence is real and belongs here: 39th in The World's 50 Best Bars in 2019 and off the top 50 entirely in 2024 and 2025, so the biggest list in the category has been going the other way while the newest one crowned it. Weighed with craft first, the glass wins the argument. It is a hotel bar at three dollar signs, walk-ins are welcome, and the green marble is the bar Dandelyan drank at.