Tayēr + Elementary

The Bar That Rewrote the Brief

Old Street does not announce itself as a destination for serious drinking. The junction is functional east London: traffic, construction hoardings, the particular grey of a weekday afternoon. Which makes the experience of stepping into 152 Old Street all the more disorienting. The exposed industrial interior of Elementary — concrete, steel, the low hum of a room that knows what it is doing — signals something different from the moment you walk in. There is no theatrical misdirection, no hidden door, no password. The design itself is the statement.

This matters because London's cocktail scene spent much of the 2010s in love with concealment. The speakeasy format, the themed room, the narrative costume , all of it was a way of adding perceived value through theatre. What Monica Berg and Alex Kratena built at Tayēr + Elementary moved in the opposite direction: strip the theatre, foreground the liquid, let the ingredients do the work. That philosophy, now refined across six years of operation, has become a reference point for bartenders in cocktail capitals from Tokyo to New York. You can see its fingerprints in ingredient-led menus, in draught cocktail programs, in the quiet confidence of bars that no longer feel the need to dress up.

Two Rooms, Two Registers

The dual-format structure is the bar's most immediately practical feature and its most conceptually interesting one. Elementary, the front bar, runs as a neighbourhood-facing diner. The draught cocktails are the spine of the offer here , fast, consistent, repeatable without compromise. Weekly-changing seasonal menus and collaborative specials sit alongside own-label wine and beer. The pace is brisk. The One Sip Martini, served with a blue cheese olive, has accumulated the kind of informal reputation that turns a drink into a benchmark: it is, for many visitors, the first thing ordered and the measure against which everything else gets judged.

Through a partition, Tayēr operates at a different frequency. The centrepiece is a large hexagonally-divided bar station , the kind of structure that communicates, without words, that this is where focused work happens. The menu changes daily, built around produce that shifts with what is available and at its most expressive. The format echoes the chef's table model: you are watching the process as much as receiving the result. It is not performance for its own sake. The technique is in service of extraction , getting the most from an ingredient that may be available for a week, or three days, before the menu moves on.

Ingredient Logic as Organising Principle

The editorial angle that makes Tayēr + Elementary legible as a bar , rather than just a critically acclaimed address , is its relationship to sourcing. The Tayēr side of the operation is as close as the cocktail world gets to what serious restaurant kitchens call a market menu. The produce-driven daily format means the drinks list is not a fixed document but a response to what is available and where flavour is concentrated at a given moment. Esoteric ingredients, hyper-seasonal windows, techniques calibrated to extract rather than mask: this is the operating logic.

That approach has implications for how you drink here. Unlike a bar with a settled menu you can research in advance, Tayēr requires a degree of trust in the program rather than a predetermined order. The upside is that the drinks are, by design, more connected to time and place than almost anything else in London's bar offer. The downside, if there is one, is that it resists the kind of advance planning that many visitors to the World's 50 Best leading ten now attempt. You cannot pre-decide what you want at Tayēr. The bar decides for you, in the leading sense.

Where It Sits in London's Bar Hierarchy

London's premium bar tier has fragmented over the past decade. On one side: hotel bars with significant infrastructure, long wine lists, and a luxury-hospitality model where the drink is partly context for the room. On the other: focused, often small-capacity bars where the program is the point and the room serves the program. Tayēr + Elementary sits firmly in the second category, though at a scale and with a profile that places it in a class of its own within that group.

For comparison, bars like 69 Colebrooke Row and A Bar with Shapes For a Name occupy the technically serious end of London's independent bar scene. Academy and Amaro represent other points on the city's cocktail map. What distinguishes Tayēr + Elementary is the breadth of its influence relative to its physical footprint. This is not a bar with multiple sites or a licensing group behind it. Its reach is entirely a function of what it put on the bar.

Internationally, the comparison set includes bars that have held sustained top-ten positions in the World's 50 Best across multiple years , a vanishingly small group. Tayēr + Elementary ranked #5 in 2020, #2 in 2021, #8 in 2023, #4 in 2024, and #7 in 2025 on the Top 500 Bars list. Consistency at that level across five-plus years is a different credential from a single high-water year. It is what separates a bar that caught a moment from one that has continued to set the terms.

Beyond London, the UK bar scene has its own strong points of reference. Bramble in Edinburgh, Merchant Hotel in Belfast, Schofield's in Manchester, Mojo Leeds, and Horseshoe Bar Glasgow each anchor their respective cities. Tayēr + Elementary operates in a different register , not better by default, but calibrated toward a different ambition. Further afield, bars like L'Atelier Du Vin in Brighton and Bar Leather Apron in Honolulu share the ingredient-led seriousness that defines this tier, even as they operate in very different contexts.

Planning Your Visit

Old Street station (Elizabeth line, Northern line) puts the bar within a few minutes' walk. The dual format means there is no single correct way to visit: Elementary works as a drop-in if space allows; Tayēr, given its format, rewards more deliberate planning. The bar's Google rating sits at 4.4 across 764 reviews , a figure that reflects a wide range of visitor types and expectations, including those who arrived without prior knowledge of what the bar is designed to do. For first visits, starting at Elementary and moving through to Tayēr is the logical sequence.

For a broader view of where Tayēr + Elementary sits within the city's wider eating and drinking offer, see our full London restaurants guide.

What to Order and Why It's Worth the Visit

On the Elementary side, the One Sip Martini with a blue cheese olive is the bar's most-referenced starting point , not because it is the most complex thing on the menu, but because it encapsulates the bar's approach to restraint and precision in a single, fast hit. The draught cocktail program is where consistency is easiest to assess: these drinks are designed to hold their integrity across high volume, which is a technical achievement worth paying attention to.

The case for visiting Tayēr + Elementary rests less on any single drink than on what the bar represents as a format. A Google rating of 4.4 across 764 reviews, combined with five consecutive years in the World's 50 Best leading ten, positions this as one of the most consistently validated bars in the world. The produce-driven Tayēr program means the specific experience shifts with the season and the week, but the standard of the underlying craft does not. For anyone serious about understanding where the cocktail bar is as a form, and where it has come from, this is the most instructive address in London.