One can seemingly find cocktail bars of all kinds today, from ones that push offbeat ingredients to others that offer novel experiments in the glass and the speakeasies that show no signs of stopping. Mumbai’s latest bar, Koliwada Cocktail Club, does all of these and leans into the latest trend of being a bar within a larger bar.
Koliwada Cocktail Club (KCC) is not a cocktail club. Instead, KCC is the playground for bartenders Guruprasad Tripathy and Mayur Tanpure. KCC is located inside Slink & Bardot and is a natural extension of their wildly popular cocktail menu called Tales From The Shoreline: A Koliwada Cocktail Journey, launched in late 2023.
The menu featured some truly innovative cocktails, such as Saint Nicholas, which featured sparkling watermelon wine to reflect the Koliwada community’s tradition of making homemade wines, and Coast Guard’s Brew, a milk-washed coffee and ghee cocktail that the team enjoyed after a late-night shift.
KCC’s menu, on the other hand, is more structured and leans towards savoury cocktails. The idea is to treat the cocktails as a proper six-course liquid dinner beginning with an amuse-bouche to dessert. The cocktails also hint at serious technique in terms of extracting flavours and showcasing the bartenders’ skills.
“Over the past few years, the world of mixology has moved beyond cocktails being sweet and syrup-based drinks. There are so many new and novel techniques that it feels like a disservice to the skill set of mixologists to not push these new-age cocktails forward. As Slink and Bardot has already established itself as a space for elevated cocktails, we decided to pursue savoury cocktails in the intimacy of its own dedicated space without it being distracted by other elements such as loud music or a busy space,” Vicky Singh, co-founder of Slink and Bardot and KCC says.
Our evening begins with a tasting of the Asian Picante, which sits inside a handmade snail glass. The Picante’s Asian flavours come from soy sauce and nori with clarified cheese. The drink is part of the Timeless Classics menu that sits alongside KCC’s savoury-forward menu and is designed to let patrons sit for longer and try more drinks alongside a menu of small bites.
The KCC menu starts with Sushi, the amuse-bouche course, and sets the tone for the evening. Combining Japanese toasted sushi rice vodka, watermelon, and cucumber wine, the salty, briny drink gets the savoury note just right.
Each drink is also paired with a small bite to complement the cocktail’s flavours. Singh says that the kitchen team was involved right through the genesis of the menu, but unlike the norm, the kitchen took cues from the drinks. “Because each cocktail was designed first, and then the kitchen team figured out what bite would go best with the drink.”
The bite with Sushi is paired with a single piece of sushi rice topped with cured watermelon and goat cheese on top. Once done, we move on to the Gazpacho for the soup course and, the presentation completely blows the mind.
While the cocktail itself contains house gazpacho with tequila and tomato pickle, it is served with an air of cucumber and onion that stays surprisingly firm until you lick it off before drinking the Gazpacho. Paired with a tomato tart, the cocktail bleeds tomato umami on the palate in delicious sips.
The salad course comes next and is inspired by Tom Sam and features gin, papaya, and raw mango that undergoes a nitro cryo-filtration in which the cocktail is freezed with liquid nitrogen and is then clarified and comes with peanuts called Som Tam.
Appetiser gets its own cocktail in the form of Tamales, a decadent chicken broth and tequila that’s been smoked with corn husk along with jalapenos and tamarind. A large chunk of sweet lime sits on top of the ice, and you are encouraged to squeeze it into your drink and see it change flavour on your palate. This is the most savoury cocktail on the tasting menu, and the way seemingly disparate ingredients come together is something that will keep you going back for more.
The main course features Morel, a mushroom cocktail that takes inspiration from a previous potent Old-Fashioned-style drink from the Slink & Bardot menu that now gets milk washed to add a restrained depth to the cocktail without leaning into its umami texture for support.
The dessert course is where things get really interesting because a savoury cocktail menu can’t end on a sweet note. Or can it? The answer comes in the form of a miracle berry, a tiny fruit that causes sour foods to taste sweet. Called Rocky Road and paired with ingredients such as gochujang, dark chocolate cookie, and torched meringue, the course is technically savoury but palatably sweet.
KCC is meant to slow things down and draw in cocktail connoisseurs, apart from Slink and Bardot’s regular guests, who come in to shake a leg and have a good time but not necessarily to enjoy the curated food and beverage experience.
Koliwada Cocktail Club is open on Sunday and from Tuesday to Thursday. Reservations for KCC are required at least 24 hours in advance, even though guests are free to choose the number of cocktails they wish to try. You can choose from a four-course (priced at Rs 6000++) or the full six-course cocktail tasting menu (priced at Rs 8500++). A small sidebar, though, this is not a dining experience, and you will be looking for more food by the end of your experience. Thankfully, Slink & Bardot’s food is luxuriously underrated and will give you more aha-worthy moments if you do decide to continue your dinner experience at the same spot.
With only 25 seats and open for just a few days a week, this is the sort of tasting experience that you show off to friends from other cities and indulge in occasionally just to see how far bars have come in just a few years.