Cato Alexander was born enslaved in New York, freed in 1799 and went on to keep a Harlem tavern famous enough to make him, in the phrase cocktail historians use, America's first celebrity bartender. His signature was the julep. In Seven Dials, more than two centuries on, the julep has a ground floor named after him. That a London bar should reach back for a New York innkeeper tells you something about the moment: the city's new bars are less interested in inventing an atmosphere than in inheriting one.
Look at the addresses. A Welsh chapel, finished in 1888, once piped the sermon down to its basement, and the basement now serves highballs. The Gothic bar of the Midland Grand, which John Betjeman helped to save from demolition, is now a Martini bar. A Grade II listed pub of 1892 is a pub again. A gilded eagle on the roof of the old American embassy has a terrace beneath it. Each room had a purpose before this one, and the bars are better for knowing it.
Then there are the obsessions. Spirits aged in Cretan clay. A calendar of seventy-two Japanese micro-seasons. A single beer on draught, served in small caña glasses. They are specific enough to be arguments, and a city that once copied New York is now having its own.
