A new bar in Soho with Nightjar and Milk & Honey heritage?!?

Why yes. Swift has recently opened at the Charing Cross Road end of Old Compton Street. It’s a two floor bar with a light ‘drop in’ bar at street level serving mostly gin based drinks and a basement speak easy focusing far more on darker spirits (which requires booking).

Bar nerd (what?) that I am, I managed to book a table for Monday evening (yay! drinking on a school night). The first thing that struck me as we were walking downstair was the volume. It was really noisy down there. It got worse too. The ceilings are very low and all the (lovely art deco) walls and floors are very hard so the acoustics are not conducive to quiet. I’ve never been in such a noisy cocktail bar before (in fact the only bars in general I’ve been that come close are rammed ones in railway arches). It was so noisy I struggled to focus on the menu!

Don’t worry, I did manage to order a drink. It was called Amber Cane – a mix of rum, madiera, benedictine and orangey things – which rather predictably with that list of ingredients tasted of Christmas. Given that it’s late December, this is entirely apt and was all of the nom!

Next up was The Prestige – a brandy and pistachio thing. It wasn’t the best tasting cocktail I’ve ever had, but it had exactly the right amount of egg white in to have an absolutely amazing texture. 

Here ended the night – despite the good drinks and fantastic service (seriously great service – can’t praise it enough!) and enough time left on our reservation for another drink, it was too noisy to have a conversation or even hear ourselves think, so we called it a night. We should possibly have had a final drink upstairs, which was much quieter!