Charles H to open secret lab bar
The new offering from the Charles H team at the Four Seasons Hotel Seoul has just eight seats and will open this month (31 July).
Called H Bar – The Lab of Fine Drinking, the new offering will be found in the hotel’s basement.
As with Charles H, H Bar is inspired by cocktail writer Charles H Baker Jr, who was behind such books as The Gentleman’s Companion. The new venue intends to reimagine ‘how the celebrated author and bon vivant might host a gathering in Seoul today’.
The team will use the laboratory to create cocktails from ‘hyper-seasonal’ local ingredients using techniques such as rotary evaporation, centrifugation, liquid nitrogen and freeze-drying.
The bar will serve cocktails in a ‘course’ format, with eight drinks accompanied by three pairing bites. The course menu will run for two seatings a night, charged at KRW 150,000 (US$110) per person.
The bar will also offer à la carte cocktails outside of course seating hours.
The team aims to capture ‘the essence of surprise’ through elements such as Shampagne, made exclusively with Korean ingredients, as well as the ‘solid-form uniqueness’ of a frozen Sgroppino.
Throughout the seasons, the bar will incorporate ingredients such as Chodang corn, Daejeo tomato, Korean melon, mango, and perilla leaf.
Drinks include Matcha Latte, which is finished with flash-frozen local herbs and a hand-cut ice diamond. Meanwhile, Journey is based around the ‘global culinary journey’ of a tomato.
The Dual Daiquiri is served with a pearl that the bar claims will transform the cocktail’s flavour profile with the first sip.
The interiors are minimalist, featuring a quartz bar top, chromised steel, and green lacquer. Korean artisans have custom-designed tableware for the bar.
The bar itself is H-shaped, giving all eight guests a front-row view of the bartender in action.
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