Cato, Four Months On

A bar's first months are usually spent in useful obscurity — finding its feet, settling its service, learning its own room. Cato hasn't quite had that luxury. We opened in Covent Garden in February, and within weeks found ourselves named by the Evening Standard among the ten bars it reckons have "changed London forever" — rare company for a room only a few months old, and rarer still for one that isn't tucked inside a grand hotel. We'll take it. But the recognition isn't really the story. The bar is.

Cato is named for Cato Alexander, the celebrated New York bartender of the early 1800s — though the history lesson more or less ends there. What we set out to build was a bar with two distinct moods under one roof. Come in off Mercer Street and you arrive in the House of Julep, a New York tavern in spirit, built around a drink almost no one else bothers to champion. Head downstairs and the tempo changes entirely.

Colour Has Flavour

The basement is where our partner, Angelos Bafas, has the most fun. The menu down there is called Colour Has Flavour, and it's inspired by synaesthesia — where the senses overlap and inform one another. Fourteen cocktails unfold across seven hues, each one exploring how colour can shape and sharpen flavour, aroma and texture.

Every drink is named after its two defining ingredients, chosen for their shared colour and sensory character. Familiar and unexpected pairings are drawn together with thoughtful, modern technique into something balanced and expressive. And every ingredient, from produce to spirits, is sourced exclusively from distilleries and producers across the United Kingdom — a celebration of British terroir, reinterpreting global flavours through a local lens. You can browse the full menu here.

What the critics made of it

For all that we'd rather talk about the drinks, the reviews have been kind. The Evening Standard ran its review under a headline we won't pretend we didn't enjoy:

London's best bartender is found here.

— The Evening Standard

In the Observer, Hannah Crosbie — who plainly understood the brief — wrote that there were "no lurid colours, no bell jars filled with smoke, no goldleaf-adorned kumquats," and that, for all the talk of concept, "nothing could be simpler." We're happy to live with that.

A room with momentum

Reviews are one thing; a full room is another, and Cato has had both. We've also loved handing the keys to friends from elsewhere. Takeover nights have brought in the teams behind Locale in Florence, Elysian in Budapest and Sins of Sal, while a Bubbles & Burgers evening with Three Cents filled the place to the rafters. Watching the room fill with someone else's drinks, ideas and regulars — Florence and Budapest by way of Covent Garden — has quietly become one of our favourite things to do.

For us at Bart & Taylor, Cato is the kind of place we got into this business to make: a room with a point of view, looked after by people who genuinely care, and one people come back to rather than simply tick off a list. It's become that quicker than we dared hope — and we're nowhere near done with it.

Four months in, Cato already feels less like a newcomer and more like somewhere that was always meant to be there. Which, if we're honest, was the whole idea.

Cato in the press

• The Evening Standard — "London's best bartender is found here"
• The Evening Standard — "10 bars that changed London forever"
• The Observer — "Cocktails with colourful tastes"
• Wallpaper* — Cato, London
• Broadsheet — First look at Cato
• Hot Dinners — Cato, Covent Garden review
• Reset Magazine — Cato, Covent Garden