Swift Soho

Swift opened on Old Compton Street in November 2016, taking over the site of the long-running Soho drinking den Lab. It is the work of Bobby Hiddleston and Mia Johansson — a bartending couple who met while working at the celebrated (now-shuttered) Milk & Honey — in partnership with Edmund Weil and Rosie Stimpson, the team behind the acclaimed Nightjar and Oriole. The name is a promise: an upstairs bar built for a quick, well-made drink before dinner or the theatre, no booking required. It has since grown into a small group, with further Swift bars in Shoreditch and Borough, and is a near-permanent fixture on the World's 50 Best Bars list.

The Soho original is really two bars in one. The ground-floor room is bright, compact and briskly run, with a menu of aperitivos, wines, low-ABV serves and non-alcoholic cocktails poured over hand-cut clear ice with minimal garnish. Downstairs is a darker, reservations-only basement lounge with leather booths, an enormous whisky collection (more than 300 bottles across a 68-page list) and live jazz on Tuesday and Sunday evenings. Cocktails on the ground floor are grouped by character — Bright, Delicate, Rich and Stiff — so you order by mood rather than by base spirit.

The alcohol-free options sit inside those same categories rather than being exiled to an afterthought, each marked "0%" and priced around £9. The 0% Working Holiday is the effervescent, juicy one: Atopia spiced-citrus distillate lengthened with hops, passion fruit, pink grapefruit sherbet and sparkling green tea. The 0% Rock Garden is the short, zesty sour — Atopia spiced citrus and Seedlip Spice 94 shaken with almond, lemon and egg white for a properly foamed texture. Both lean on Swift's house sherbets and the same clarified, clean-glass presentation as the full-strength list, so they read as considered cocktails rather than fruit juice. The upstairs menu also carries non-alcoholic beer, alcohol-free wine and a rotating aperitivo section, and the bar team will build off-menu zero-proof serves on request.