It’s not technically called A Bar with Shapes for a Name, but that’s how you’ll have to refer to it. It’s true name is 🔶🟥🔵—impossible to say, but intriguing and enigmatic. Its peculiarly styled name is just the one of the ways in which Shapes, as it’s often nicknamed, exists outside of the traditional cocktail bar box. Opened in 2021 in East London, Shapes is built entirely around Bauhaus principles and serves drinks that are as surprising as they are elegant.
After working together for years at the much-lauded Artesian Bar in London, Paul Lougrat and Remy Savage set off on their own. Their concept: create a bar that’s based, from top to bottom, on the principles laid out by the Bauhaus.
In line with the tenets of the revolutionary art school founded in 1919 in Germany, the team at Shapes created a bar where form follows function, with drinks based around functional minimalism, radical simplicity, and the unification of technology, art, and craft. Savage was fiercely committed to upholding Bauhaus tenets as he began to build out Shapes. “We pride ourselves on being completely coherent with a particular artistic ambition,” he says.
The idea, he explains, is to answer a question essential to the Bauhaus movement: “How can we manifest beauty at scale?” The answer is to create a bar in which every element is as functional as possible. That means flavor elements like fruits and herbs are made into distillates for more consistent application in cocktails, and that each drink is pre-batched and individually bottled for speed of service and perfect consistency. Each cocktail is rigorously evaluated on flavor elements, texture, aroma, and appearance to most perfectly express the vision of the bartender who made it. The team makes its own ice so that each sphere is perfectly round, each cube sharply squared off. “Everything that takes a long time has already been made,” Savage says, “and all of this is done in the back of house in order to be able to effectively serve drinks that still are creative and very current modern drinks.”
Bauhaus is just the beginning. Savage plans to open bars built around different modern art movements all around the world. In June of 2023, he opened up Bar Nouveau in Paris and has ideas for an Art Deco bar in the US. “You can google 10 different art movements from the 20th century,” he says, “I will open bars based on all of them.” The beauty of Shapes, though, is that you don’t need to know anything about art history, Bauhaus design aesthetics, or the delicate science of distillation to have a good time and a great cocktail. Here are three drinks at Shapes that help tell its story.
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Kazimir
Inspired by the painting White on White by Kazimir Malevich, this cocktail arrives as a clear liquid with a single large ice cube. Just as Malevich’s deceptively simple painting portrays an off-white square askew on a white canvas, Savage’s drink holds much more than it seems. The crystal clear liquid is peach yogurt that’s been clarified in a centrifuge with vodka and finished with a few dashes of absinthe. “The idea is to carry tension between the two strong aromatics: the stone fruit and the absinthe,” Savage says. The large cube, made in Shapes’ own facility—Bauhaus Warehaus, just down the road—holds a square glass prism inside like some kind of tesseract, another reference to the frame-within-a-frame motif of Malevich’s painting. Each sip is lightly sweet and satiny soft, thanks to the lactic acid left over from the clarifying process.
Pastel
One of the bar’s original formulations, the Pastel was designed as an approachable Tom Collins–style cocktail. In iterating on what this drink might be, Savage became curious about how he might multiply the acidic elements. “What would it bring to add malic acid through the use of rhubarb?” he wondered. That was compounded with an ingenious invention he calls recomposed lime—lime juice distillate, which carries the aroma of lime, combined with malic, citric, and ascorbic acids, as well as salt and sugar. It’s a liquid that smells and tastes exactly like lime juice, but it’s infinitely shelf-stable—a must for Shapes’ bottled cocktails. Swap out the Tom Collins’s traditional gin for vodka, and add a splash of raspberry eau de vie, and you’ve got the bright, snappy, light pink, and bubbly Pastel. “It’s the most sessionable drinker in the universe, I believe,” Savage says.
バター割り (batā-wari)
The batā-wari is Shapes’s take on Mizuwari, translated as “cut with water,” in which one part whiskey is mixed with two parts water. Shapes’ take is somewhat more involved. The drink started with fat-washing whiskey in butter, but Savage found it lacking some of the sweetness he wanted. That’s where golden syrup came into play. To add a bit of dynamism and cut through these big flavors, the team added the piney, menthol notes of Palo Santo via an ultra-concentrated tea made with the aromatic wood itself. “Because of the very bright note, it was actually quite easy to balance the drink.” There are a few major flavors at play here, but the leathery, smoked flavors of the whiskey remain at the foundation of the golden, gently carbonated cocktail.
