Butterfly effect becomes catalyst for Silver Lyan menu
Washington DC-based Silver Lyan has unveiled its fifth anniversary menu, inspired by the unexpected ripple effects of exchanging knowledge.
Celebrating five years in the US capital, Silver Lyan, located in a former bank vault on the lower level of the Riggs Washington D.C. hotel, has launched its latest cocktail menu: The Butterfly Effect, which builds on the bar’s overarching approach of ‘cultural exchange’.
Speaking exclusively to The Spirits Business, Ryan Chetiyawardana, better known as Mr Lyan, shares how the team approached the menu by exploring how different cultures, ideas and knowledge interact and create unexpected positive consequences.
“When we were going through the menus at Silver Lyan, the first part was looking at ‘cultural exchange’ and how it is about movement, and that was inspired by the city, and having all of these different people that you see flow through,” he says.
“It’s the most diverse city in the US, and you see that – all of these different parts have kind of intermingled. And you know, we wanted to celebrate that – the positive sides of some of those conversations that I don’t think always get talked about. But as we started to focus on those stories, we kind of realised that as the capital – as a place where these kind of places have flown through – these ripples get wider. And so we started to look at it over the menus, not just as focused-in on stories of movements, but the idea of the way that things move.”
Cultural exchange
Chetiyawardana shares that they looked at migration not just in a physical sense, but also philosophically. “That was a lovely way of translating those ideas and seeing how they apply to so many parts of life, not just human nature. And you know, it was a really wonderful thing to see these effects and go, actually, this is a thing that all creatures do – we have commonality in that way.”
He continues: “There is this positivity and growth when you share knowledge, and that knowledge exchange doesn’t need to be as obvious as it always could be. And so by the time we started breaking into some of these stories, we kind of realised that that was quite an interesting thing to look at – where does this movement happen in unexpected ways? And we just started to think on that as a loose concept. Then we just kept dialling out and then realising that that’s the kind of beauty of these kind of exchanges. There’s the obvious ones that have direct consequences, but there’s these other magical ones that tend to happen in slightly unexpected ways or unintended consequences.”
Chetiyawardana explains that the creative process of the curation of this menu was made easier by the extreme diversity of Silver Lyan’s bar team. While it is an all-American team, the difference in cultural backgrounds is vast, with some team members previously working in government roles, including one former Pentagon employee, while others come from musical theatre backgrounds.
This, he says, “means that if you give them that overarching topic, they will do their own research and find the things that interest them from their background, because we’re not hemming them in in any way. It’s an overarching thing. Think laterally: go find stories, and from there, we’ll collate them together, and we’ll spend a bit of time asking ‘do we find this interesting, and is it interesting to people who aren’t just, like us, a big group geeks?’”
Making the drinks resonate with the diverse audience that travels through its bars is always the main focus of the Lyan group.
Chetiyawardana says they always ask if a drink is going to inspire the consumer to tell their friends or family about it down the pub. “Those are the things that we try and look at – those kind of wonderful little ‘did you know’ sound bites.”
He explains that they aimed to create drinks that weren’t literal representations of the stories they uncovered, but allegorical interpretations that capture the emotion and essence of the narrative. The goal, he says, was to push creative boundaries, avoid standard cocktail formulas, and develop drinks that tell compelling stories while remaining delicious and engaging.
“We don’t want it to be literal, because that takes away any of the magic of storytelling. Great storytelling is about allegory, right? You need it to be something that engages, and obviously it’s got to be delicious. So if we just took it as ‘this flavour equals this’, it would end up a muddy mess, whereas what we’re trying to do is go, how do we push our creativity so we’re not just making another Manhattan or Daiquiri or Martini, because it’s very easy to fall into this formula as well when you’ve been working in bars for a good number of years. So if we start to extrapolate the emotion behind that, or what it relates to or what is reflected at the heart of that principle, rather than just ‘flavour that equals this’, we can then start to help that and it’s often that the story will inform a technique around something.”
Extensive R&D
Through 17 signature creations, including Silver Lyan classics, The Butterfly Effect invites guests to explore the bigger picture, consider long-term impact, and embrace the playful absurdities of human nature.
With the Lyan group known for its innovative and unique ingredients, Chetiyawardana shares just how much labour has gone into the curation of the elements that feature on this year’s menu.
“It’s a year-long process of that story development,” he explains. “We extrapolate the flavours, then we go into R&D on some of those techniques, because as a result of those techniques being born from the story, they’re often novel. There might be a fermentation that we’ve used in a different style of application, but it’s still something completely new – we haven’t got something that we can go to a recipe book and buy, or even ask another peer or something like that, because it’s often the first time it’s been done.”
He notes that working with novel ingredients often means navigating complex bureaucracy, especially in the US. The team collaborates closely with regulatory bodies to demonstrate safety and set new standards. “We obviously do due diligence to make sure that it’s safe and it’s going to be something that we can replicate. But that process then takes time as well, and then we get into the layering and the finalisation of the drink. So it’s a big process, and we’ve done everything that we can to nurture that as well – to push the creativity for the teams, but also build it into our model. This is how we do stuff. It’s a dumb amount of labor on R&D to reach a final point. But, you know, it’s the way that we work, and we do that as a way of both training and starting our team, but also coming up with things that then feel quite different on the output.”
Menu highlights
The team has drawn influence from DC’s music, food, drink and history. As such, the menu is split into four chapters, each featuring four cocktails: Culture & Media explores the knock-on effects of cultural expression which often takes unexpected turns; Law & Government is the intersection of human predictability with the structures of government and the surprising outcomes of this; Conflict is inspired by the unintended consequences of human disputes; and the Silver Classics, are guest favourites from previous menus which live on.
Chetiyawardana shares that consumers can look forward to trying some new and interesting flavours in the menu that have undergone the bar’s extensive development process. “We have one drink that employs blue cheese mould,” he says, referencing Hokusai Snap – a bold apéritif found in ‘Culture & Media’, featuring Fords Gin, starfruit fino, bleu curaçao, Fuji apple, and damson plum EDV. This ingredient, the bleu curaçao, allowed the team to look at a very different type of fermentation. “We explored it a bit at Lyaness,” he shares, noting that that R&D process allowed the team to consider different types of flavour development, and with that learning were able to apply it in a different way at Silver Lyan. “That’s definitely one that I think is really, really fun in terms of the application aspects of it,” he says.
He adds that the new menu also includes inorganic products, such as antler, which can be found in The Mighty O – a celebration of unexpected contrasts in a whisky sour, crafted with Monkey Shoulder, miyeok mukchim cordial, turbo persimmon, lemon and antler, which is also available alcohol-free and found in the ‘Conflict’ section of the menu.
This serve was inspired by the pattern of after-effects human conflict creates space for, from sinking warships that assist with coral growth, to the DMZ [Demilitarised Zone] between North and South Korea becoming one of the most biodiverse places on the peninsula.
In ‘Law & Government’, Pikachu Pop is described as a zesty Spritz, created through a blend of Ketel One, pisco, kiwi ketchup, Sauvignon Blanc, mace, olive leaf, and boldo soda. The serve was inspired by a 2018 story in which a Pokémon-obsessed child in Chile used his mother’s credit card to make US$800 worth of purchases, highlighting a cascade of events, and the ‘unpredictable consequences of digital autonomy’.
Finally, the ‘Silver Classics’ section stays true to the cocktails that guests know and love, offering playful and innovative twists.
Highlights include the elegant Silver Apple Martini, with Belvedere 10, clarified green apple, Capreolus ‘1000 Trees’ and bisongrass, alongside the Silver Service Martini, which is available with Fords Gin or Belvedere Vodka and is served with house accoutrements for a ‘personal and timeless’ experience.
The bar also offers fun takes on classic shots, including Tots & Shots, available in three blends and served with the American classic tater tots, and Jello Shots, available with Aperol Spritz or Hugo Spritz and served with a Champagne chaser.
Looking back at previous menus the teams have curated over the years at each of the Lyan venues, Chetiyawardana has his predictions of which serves are likely to be popular with consumers on The Butterfly Effect menu, noting that while the bar itself is a really pretty room, they have noticed that some of the most popular drinks tend to be the ones that balance against that, such as the frozen drinks that feature on the menu.
“On the flip side of that,” he says, “our Old Fashioneds end up being popular. I think people like to be able to see us do very interesting takes on drinks that they do know about. They know that we can open up a really great classic Old Fashioned.”
However, he says, “I also like that it’s sometimes been a bit unobvious with our drinks, and sometimes it’s something else that ends up being runaway success.”
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