Kol Mezcalería

Agave Meets the British Larder: London's Mezcal Underground

Descend below street level on Seymour Street in Marylebone and the visual language shifts immediately. Earth tones, low light, and a spatial logic that reads less like a London cocktail bar and more like a mezcal producer's anteroom in Oaxaca. The basement setting is deliberate: Kol Mezcalería operates as a distinct environment from the restaurant above, with its own rhythm, its own programme, and its own approach to what a spirits-led bar can do when it takes both source material and locality seriously.

London's cocktail scene has moved through several phases in the past fifteen years, from the theatrical speakeasy wave to the technically rigorous clarified-drink era, and more recently toward bars that anchor themselves to specific spirit categories and sourcing philosophies. Kol Mezcalería sits inside that last shift. Its editorial premise — Mexican agave spirits in conversation with wild British produce — is not a marketing distinction but a structural one. It shapes what gets poured, what gets made in-house, and how the drinks list is constructed from the ground up.

The Spirits Programme: Curation as Editorial Stance

Mezcal as a category is wide and poorly understood at the consumer level. The difference between a mass-produced joven and a small-batch papalome from a single Oaxacan producer can be as significant as the gap between supermarket Prosecco and a grower Champagne. Bars that work seriously with agave spirits tend to fall into one of two approaches: the encyclopaedic collection model, which privileges breadth, or the curated selection model, which prioritises provenance and coherence.

Kol Mezcalería operates on the curated model. The bar functions as an extension of the restaurant's sourcing logic, which is built around connecting Mexican culinary tradition to British seasonal ingredients. Applied to the spirits programme, this means the selection serves the narrative rather than the other way around. Agave varieties, production regions, and distillation methods matter here in the way grape varieties and appellations matter to a serious wine list: they are not decorative information but the actual architecture of what you are being offered.

For context, London has only a handful of bars working at this level of specificity with mezcal. The category has grown significantly in UK on-trade listings over the past decade, but most venues treat it as an extension of the tequila section rather than as its own discipline. The distinction at Marylebone is that the curation here is anthropological as much as gastronomic , spirits are selected for what they say about the communities and landscapes that produce them, not simply for their flavour profile.

The British Produce Dimension

What gives the programme its editorial specificity is the intersection with wild British ingredients. This is not a garnish decision. The use of native British botanicals, foraged materials, and seasonal British produce in the cocktail builds reflects the same logic that governs the kitchen above: that Mexican technique and British raw materials are not in conflict but in dialogue. Kombu, sea herbs, hedgerow fruits, and similar materials appear in the kind of context where they function as structural components, not decorative ones.

This approach places Kol Mezcalería in an interesting position relative to its London peers. Bars like 69 Colebrooke Row and A Bar with Shapes For a Name have built reputations on technical rigour and conceptual clarity, while venues like Academy and Amaro operate in adjacent territory with their own categorical depth. The Mezcalería's distinction is that it is one of the few London bars where the spirits sourcing and the ingredient sourcing follow the same intellectual logic, pulling in opposite geographical directions to land in the same place on the palate.

Recognition and Competitive Position

The Top 500 Bars ranking placed Kol Mezcalería at #118 globally in 2025. That position is meaningful context. The list tends to reward bars with clear identities and credible programmes over venues with broad appeal or high volume. At #118, the Mezcalería sits in the upper tier of globally ranked London bars, in company that includes some of the city's most technically serious operations.

The parent restaurant, KOL, holds a separate but reinforcing position. GQ Food and Drink Awards named Santiago Lastra Leading Chef in 2021, and KOL has been described as arguably London's leading Mexican restaurant at this moment. The bar benefits from that institutional credibility without being subordinate to it. The two floors function as independent propositions that happen to share a sourcing philosophy and a postcode.

Across the UK, the bar programme at this level competes in a set that extends well beyond London. Schofield's in Manchester, Bramble in Edinburgh, and Merchant Hotel in Belfast each occupy credible positions in the national conversation, as do Mojo Leeds and Horseshoe Bar Glasgow in their respective cities. Internationally, bars like Bar Leather Apron in Honolulu and L'Atelier Du Vin in Brighton demonstrate how specialist category focus travels across different markets. Kol Mezcalería's #118 ranking puts it ahead of most in that wider field.

Planning Your Visit

The bar is located at the lower ground floor of 9 Seymour Street, W1H 7BA, within easy reach of Marble Arch and Edgware Road stations. Marylebone as a neighbourhood positions the Mezcalería in a quieter, more residential part of central London than the Soho or Fitzrovia bar clusters, which affects the ambient register of a visit: the experience skews toward considered rather than high-energy. For a broader view of London's drinking and dining scene, see our full London restaurants guide.