A theatrical cocktail bar flying the name of the medieval alchemist, turning drinks into smoke, colour-change and spectacle
The Alchemist at Canary Wharf carries a 4.3 across more than two thousand two hundred reviews and flies one of the most evocative names a cocktail bar could choose – the alchemist, the medieval seeker who tried to turn base metal into gold. It is a theatrical, smoke-and-spectacle sort of bar, and the Prat’s naming desk finds the conceit genuinely clever.
Canary Wharf, properly
The Alchemist sits in the heart of Canary Wharf, serving the estate’s crowds its famous theatrical drinks. Properly Docklands, no disclaimer needed.
The medieval dream
Alchemy was the great obsession of the medieval and early-modern mind: the attempt to transform base metals into gold, to discover the philosopher’s stone, to find the elixir of eternal life. The alchemists, half-scientist and half-magician, laboured over their crucibles and alembics in pursuit of transformation itself – the turning of one thing into another, of the ordinary into the precious. It was a dream that never came true, but it laid the very foundations of modern chemistry along the way. As a name for a cocktail bar, it is inspired: for what is a great cocktail but the transformation of ordinary spirits into something precious and magical?
Smoke, colour and spectacle
The bar takes the conceit gloriously literally. Its drinks arrive with smoke and dry-ice fog, with liquids that change colour before your eyes, with fire and fizz and theatrical flourishes – cocktails staged as chemistry experiments, mixed by bartenders playing at being alchemists. The Prat’s editorial position on such theatre is one of cheerful indulgence: a drink that arrives smoking and colour-shifting is undeniably more fun than one that simply sits there, and there is real skill in the showmanship. It turns the making of a cocktail into a small piece of magic, which is exactly what the name promises.
Transformation, achieved
What the Prat likes best is how completely the name and the experience align. The alchemists sought to transform matter and never quite managed it; the Alchemist bar transforms an ordinary evening into a spectacle, and manages it every night. Where the medieval seekers failed to make gold, the modern ones make magic reliably, glass by smoking glass. The 4.3 across two thousand-plus reviews suggests the transformation delights the crowds – the base metal of a Wednesday night turned, briefly, to gold.
There is a further aptness the Prat cannot resist. Alchemy was the secret ancestor of modern chemistry – the mystical pursuit that, for all its failures, developed the crucibles, the distillations and the techniques that real science later inherited. And a cocktail bar is, quite literally, applied chemistry for pleasure: distillation, infusion, emulsion, the careful combination of compounds to produce a precise effect. The Alchemist honours that lineage directly, staging the old magic and the new chemistry as one continuous act of transformation. The alchemists would, the Prat suspects, have approved of the smoke.
Verdict
A 4.3 across two thousand two hundred-plus reviews is a solid score for a theatrical cocktail bar, and the Alchemist earns it on spectacle and skill alike. Its name is a small masterpiece: the medieval alchemist’s dream of transformation, delivered in smoke and colour-change and fire, turning ordinary spirits into precious magic glass by glass.
Go for the smoking, colour-shifting, theatrical cocktails and the sheer spectacle of it, and enjoy the conceit of the bartender as alchemist. The medieval seekers never made their gold – but a good cocktail bar performs its transformations every single night.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
The accuracy of the dialogue suggests either obsessive note-taking or trauma-based memory. Someone’s definitely lived through these exact exchanges.