Most cocktail menu updates aren’t often heralded with such fanfare, however neither are they the product of almost a 12 months of labor. For the crew at Silver Lyan, the important Penn Quarter cocktail bar from London-based grasp mixologist Ryan Chetiyawardana’s (“Mr. Lyan”), the brand new menu is especially vital (900 F Road NW). It’s the fifth main menu iteration since its 2020 debut within the depths of the Riggs resort, and the primary since Silver Lyan was named one of many Prime 50 Bars in North America for 2025 (No. 48), becoming a member of Service Bar and Allegory on the coveted listing.
The 2-week-old Butterfly Impact menu at Silver Lyan — its “most elaborate menu refresh up to now,” per basic supervisor Alex Leidy — is the results of 9 months of intensive writing, improvement, and tremendous tuning.
The ultimate product is a set of 12 cocktails that play on the theme of happenstance and coincidence expressed in ingenious formulations. That features the Pikachu Pop, which inexplicably ties the story of how Pikachu turned the face of a 2019 Chilean political motion to a spritzy drink with Chilean kiwi.
Or the Operation Thoughts Fuck, which transforms the story a conspiracy principle involving an creator pal of Lee Harvey Oswald, the Kennedy assassination, and the Illuminati right into a smoked carrot vermouth and spring pea cordial suffused concoction. Leidy describes it as “the proper final drink of a day that began very early or first drink of an evening that’s going to finish very late.”
With the theme as a place to begin, the crew spends a number of months creating the totally different tales behind every cocktail. “It’s like a author’s room,” says head bartender Sam Nellis. “A variety of our non-bar employees contribute and it democratizes the method.” As soon as the tales have been narrowed all the way down to the chosen 12, the crew conducts what they describe as “taste mapping,” which Nellis calls a “pie within the sky brainstorming session the place something within the tales that may very well be a taste are written down and result in what the flavour and construction of the ultimate drink is likely to be.”
It’s solely as soon as the menu copy has been finalized do the crew start truly creating the recipes and substances for every drink. “From copy, it takes three to 4 months to cocktails,” Nellis says. “We mark the type, texture, and taste of every element within the story.”
To execute the Butterfly Impact menu, the crew wanted to make 30-40 new parts that weren’t already available, together with an acorn tincture and reanimated berry madeira for the It’s Alive! 75.
“Once we put down reanimated berry madeira, we had the concept we might electrocute one thing,” remembers Nellis. What the crew ultimately got here up with was a course of by which raspberries and blackberries are infused right into a dry madeira earlier than being electrocuted to advertise oxidation. It’s a posh method they have been in a position to make use of after consulting with Chetiyawardana and his tenured crew of mixologists at Tremendous Lyan in Amsterdam and Lyaness in London.
However not each concept throughout the writing and brainstorming course of makes it into the ultimate product. Nellis remembers an early iteration of the Hokusai Snap, which was impressed by the unintentional discovery of the pigment Prussian Blue.
Drawing a parallel to different examples of laboratory serendipity, Nellis tried to imitate the unintentional discovery of Penicillin by using penicillium roqueforti to ferment olive oil or cream to create one thing
just like blue cheese. “However after extra analysis, we went a unique route,” says Nellis. “We didn’t need to give folks botulism.” The ultimate part resembled a much less mad science-y milk punch Curaçao.
Use of formidable substances is nothing new for the crew. In 2023, Silver Lyan’s annual menu makeover known as for distilled emu neck and smoked bee larvae. Finally, the crew understands that its high-minded strategy might be alienating to some. Its Classics choice continues fills within the gaps with regards to visitors’ preferences. One playful addition to the stagnant listing is Jack and Coke Service, which riffs on its famed martini service.
“The conceptual stuff and storytelling are vital to what we do,” says Leidy. However on the finish of the day, “we’re a bar and we would like you to have a great time. If it’s not scrumptious, we’ve failed.”
