Top Hotel Bars-Merchant Hotel
Merchant Hotel- Belfast, Ireland Last week we explored some of London’s most posh hotel bars, the Dorchester and the Connaught Hotel. This week we jump the pond to explore the Merchant Hotel located in Belfast, Ireland. A hotel bar which won “The best hotel bar in the world” at Tales of the Cocktail this summer. The man who help design the bar and created and oversees the entire cocktail program is a gentleman named Sean Muldoon.
Below is my interview with him:
How did you come to work at the Merchant Hotel? The Bar opened three and a half years ago. My boss assured me from the offset that if cocktails were ever going to work in Ireland it would only be in this bar and only with my input. He knew I was the right person to run the bar and I was head-hunted for the role
Does the bar have a historic past? Yes, the building that it is in was built in the 1860′s and served as the headquarters for the Ulster Bank. The area where it is situated was once the historic heart of Belfast. It ceased to be a bank about 15 years ago and lay dormant for several years until my boss snapped it up around 8 years ago.
Do you have a philosophy behind your cocktails? Yes – to make the best drinks found anywhere on the planet! Whilst a few other bars also make great drinks in other corners of the globe, they keep their menu’s short so as to concentrate on those specific 18-20 drinks for a set period of time. We on the other hand concentrate on making 120 drinks great throughout the course of an entire year or more.
How do you decide what goes on the menu? We include the drinks we feel deserve to be on the menu: certain classics; forgotten drinks which may not be ”classic” but we feel ought to be promoted – and our own variations of these styles of drinks. We keep on drinks which sell well, replace or revamp drinks which don’t sell well and keep our own ”original drinks” quite simple.
How often do you change your menu? Once every fifteen months or so. Our menus are more like books – we tend to call them Bar Books. An awful lot of planning goes into our menus; finding the right concept for each new volume of the Bar Book is what takes up most time. Once we decide on a way to go, everything else – the drinks, recipes etc – fall into place quite easily. For example, Volume One of our Bar Book was based on the Stork Club Bar Book (1946); Volume Two of our Bar Book was based on Here’s How - Mixed Drinks (1941); whereas the newest installment of our Bar Book is based loosely on Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails (2004). Our menus are a considerable marketing spend - the most recent one cost us £11,000.00 to get 2000 copies done.
- Our drinks lists
- Connoisseurs Club that we run (www.theconnoisseursclub.org)
- our product selection.
Do you have a signature cocktail that your bar is famous for? We have recently developed an “iconic cocktail” which we hope the bar will become famous for through time (particularly amongst tourists). It is a potent single-serve punch made with plum-infused poitin, pear eau de vie, fresh lemon, local flower honey and pure County Armagh apple juice. A nationwide competition is about to be launched to find out an appropriate name for it – we want it to be a quintessential Northern Irish drink whose name gets decided by the Northern Irish people.
What celebrities have visited your bar? Tom Hanks, Bryan Adams, Shirlie McClaine, Richard Attenborough, Gloria Estefan, The Police, Meryl Streep, Morrissey, Bill Murray, Ben Kingsley, Scissor Sisters, Kings of Leon, Simply Red, Tony Curtis etc, etc.
Best night of the week to come in? Saturdays are busiest and Fridays are nice – but I myself like Sundays. On Sundays we always get a nice, steady crowd of guests who all seem to know what they want and are there to enjoy the whole cocktail experience.
Does your country have a have signature ingredient that can only be found there? Poitin: Poitín is a spirit that was traditionally distilled in a small pot still and it comes from the Irish word pota, meaning “pot”. It is traditionally distilled from malted barley grain or potatoes and for centuries was classified as “moonshine” in this country.
On one sad note, the drink that they were most famous for a few years was there Mai Tai, which sadly is no longer available at the bar. Below is the story of why it was so famous: Our Mai Tai was so special is because it was made using the original rum – J Wray & Nephew 17yr old from Jamaica – that Trader Vic used when he created the drink in 1944. We have two shots of the rum left but it has unfortunately become oxidised over time and it now tastes more like a woody bourbon than the rich pungent rum it once was. The bottle we had been one of only six original unmarked bottles that were left; these bottles once thought to be inexistence were discovered during a worldwide inventory that Wray & Nephew conducted several years ago.
In my class at Astor wine and spirits we created the Mai Tai, using the recipe given to me by bartender Michael Mcilroy who worked for had the pleasure of working for few months at the Merchant Hotel and who currently rocks the bar at two of New Yorks finest cocktail bars Milk Honey (New York) and Dutch Kills (long island city).
The recipe is as follows: Mai Tai Recipe: 1 ¼ oz Wray and Nephew 17yr old rum (We used Appleton 12yr old), ¾ Fresh Lime Juice, ½ Orgeat Syrup (almond syrup), ¾ Curacea ( orange liqour) ½ Rock Candy Syrup (we used thick simple syrup) Served over crushed ice. Garnish with a sprig of mint.
