Black Rock - A Bar Review
We've reached the end of my London bar reviews, and fittingly it's the last bar that we visited in the city. Black Rock is a new whiskey bar in London's east end, and it's already carved out a niche for itself thanks to a one-of-a-kind setup. It's a reservations-only joint (we didn't know and had to talk our way in) with a rather unique and elegantly simple way of slinging drinks.
Atmosphere and Service: Black Rock is a "garden view" bar, to use the real estate euphemism for a basement bar. It's such a small space that there's only one bathroom, for ladies, on the inside. Gents have to walk back out the entrance, where the first door on the outside of the building is our restroom. Strange, I know, but worth it.
The centerpiece of Black Rock's setup is a halved oak tree that serves as the main bar and almost all of the seating (see picture above). There are small tables to the side, but most of the action happens at the gorgeous, polished tree trunk in the middle of the space. Taps have been carved out of it, so you can pour your own water (both to drink and to dilute your chosen whiskies). Inside the log, covered by glass, are two channels through which the bar circulates two of its house cocktails. That's right -- ask for one of those drinks, and it'll be poured for you straight out of the bar itself, or rather one of the two taps at the end. Just an incredibly cool, well-engineered, conversation piece, and a combination of style and function that adds an extra-memorable touch to the night.
Also unique is the bar's "menu" system. The bar does have a small paper menu, which you can find online, and lists some cocktails and small plates. The stars of the show, however, are a set of cabinets on one side of the room with all of the bar's whiskies organized by type: Smoky, Fruity, Spicy, Rich, Balanced, etc. To decide what you want to drink, you actually look through the cabinets yourself and then ask a server to pour your selections. The pricing system is also quite simple. The bottles have small plastic dots glued to the bottom of the neck that indicate the price. One black dot is 7 pounds, two is 9, three is 11, and a gold dot means it's a rare bottle, just ask (or, if you have to ask, you probably can't afford it, as the saying goes).
Service is great here, and the bartenders clearly love their whiskies. They're happy to offer suggestions and talk about what's in the cabinets, and also pour quickly. Lovely place.
Selection: This place has a ton of whiskies. There were 6 cabinets, if I remember correctly, and I'd guess each cabinet had 25 or so whiskies in it. 150 whiskies means this place as a deep bench, and it's mostly scotch. The smoke shelf had a wealth of delicious options, including several Lagavulins.
The way of dividing up the whiskies by flavor profile also assists in processing the bottles that they do have. Right away, we knew that we'd like most of what we'd find on the Smoky shelf, but I had a lot of fun peering into the other cabinets and noticing unusual bottles or bottles that I'd seen discussed online but never encountered in real life before. The bar's setup is ideal for inexperienced whiskey drinkers or those excited to explore the hobby and get to know what type of whiskey they like. Sharing six drinks, one from each cabinet, would be a great way to go. And, because of the strength of the bar's selection, it wouldn't even need to be all that pricey. The one-black-dot selection included some very nice whiskies.
Rare Bottles: I was impressed by what Black Rock had, although I didn't try all that many because there were so many regular, black-dot bottles that I wanted to sample. The gold dots included some Buffalo Trace Antique Collection ryes, some Japanese whiskies that are exploding in popularity and in price, like Hibiki 17 and Nikka Taketsuru 17, and plenty of other coveted whiskies. However, there were also somewhat uncommon whiskies in the lower price ranges. For example, we tried an Auchroisk 10 Flora & Fauna. The Flora & Fauna collection is a Diageo roundup of their lesser known, potentially underappreciated single malts, which mostly go toward their major blends. It's cool to see that kind of bottle at a bar because that is not something that's easy to find, or something that the casual consumer would appreciate.
Value: As I've stressed throughout my London bar reviews, it's London. If you want whiskey, you kind of have to suck it up on the price. It's more than I'd like to pay, undoubtedly. That being said, the pricing of the bottles at Black Rock was not efficient in an economic sense. There were some bottles that cost $100 or more that were priced at 8-10 pounds per drink, which is pretty reasonable considering the usual bar markup. In those same categories, though, there'd be bottles that you could get for $60. Ditto for the one-black-dot bottles. I had a decent idea of bottle prices while I was there, and so balanced the value we were getting versus the novelty of what we wanted to try, and I think we ended up with a pretty respectable set of drinks for a not-outrageous tab. Let me put it this way -- we paid about as much for eight drinks here as we paid in Paris for four drinks at Golden Promise, although the drams we had there were of a higher echelon.
***
Black Rock is a fun place to try if you're out in London's east end and, as an added bonus, it's about a 10-minute walk from Kaleidoscope, the bar I reviewed earlier this week. Check them both out and thank me later! In my next two posts, I'll cover the whiskies that we tried here.