With no shortage of fabulous cocktails available across Bangkok, it’s hard to settle on just one drink. As bars around the city are gearing up for fresh starts and also launching new menus, now’s the time to skip the old-fashioned classics and treat your tastebuds to some playful concoctions. Ring in the new year with these tipples that have a striking concept or story behind them.
1. Lennon’s
Rosewood Bangkok’s vinyl bar Lennon’s is making tangible and striking strides when it comes to sustainability. In fact, they are the first hotel in Bangkok to partner with ecoSPIRITS, a company that eliminates glass and cardboard packaging waste by working directly with spirit brands. High-end spirits are filled into reusable ecoTOTES containers instead of glass bottles, all which can be returned, sanitized, sealed and redistributed to bars and restaurants. It’s a cost-effective and trash-reducing progress for both parties, as each ecoTOTE can hold 4.5 liters – that’s sure to decrease the number of glass bottles that usually end up in landfills.
To complement this new initiative, a menu of four ecoCOCKTAILS have just been unveiled. The red ecoMALI is made with Champagne that has gone flat, but is mixed with raspberries and re-carbonated for new lease of life. This tangy delight gets its sweet smell of jasmine flowers from the local Kosapan Botanicals rum. As som means orange in Thai, ecoSOM offers a citrusy note with Kosapan’s Orange Liquor, with a touch of lacto-fermented mango honey that extends the mangoes’ shelf life. Another fun (and Earth-loving) part of this collection is how you can take the cocktail menus home. Printed on compostable paper and embedded with flower seeds, guests can plant it in soil and look forward to seeing what flora will come up.
2. Playroom
To celebrate its second anniversary, the sexy Ekamai speakeasy Playroom has just unveiled a new menu that movie buffs will love, titled “Playroom Chapter 3.” Sidestepping away from the 50 Shades of Grey roots that the bar’s red interiors were inspired by, the new lineup of cocktails lets you taste other rom-com or drama flicks by embodying aspects of a popular scene from a movie, the famous leading character and its memorable storyline. The nine new cocktail creations draw from all-time favorite movies, be it Brokeback Mountain, The Girl Next Door to Thai period drama Jan Dara.