One-sip cocktails are giving ‘a swift half' a whole new meaning

Telegraph

29-03-2025

Hospitality businesses are grappling with a thorny problem: customers are not drinking like they used to. Many reports have shown that alcohol consumption is markedly down, especially among people born after 2000. In response, most restaurants and bars have expanded their 'no and low' ranges, with non-alcoholic beer and wine, and more thoughtful alcohol-free cocktails.
Even among the still-drinking, there is recognition of a swelling body of evidence that consuming a lot of alcohol is not the best thing for your health. Propose a three-Martini lunch in a British office and you will be up in front of HR before you can say 'extra dirty'. For an industry that has long found profit margins in booze, this 21st-century abstemiousness is a worrying development.
But there is another solution: just make the cocktails smaller. Rather than doling out great vats of Martini and negroni, bars and restaurants from Blinker in Manchester to Daisy in Margate are discovering the allure of the smaller measure. So much so, in fact, that journalist Tyler Zielinski has written a new book, Tiny Cocktails: The Art of Miniature Mixology, dedicated to them.
'You're drinking less, but you still get the same flavour without the overindulgence,' Zielinski tells me, over a tiny Martini and a tiny bullshot at Maison François, a brasserie in London's St James's which has a menu of shorter drinks. Front-of-house head honcho Ed Wyand says it lets diners sample the list more widely, too: 'You can drink three pretty hardcore cocktails, just less of them.'
Customers also order things they might not otherwise. The bullshot – beef consommé and vodka – which hot-blooded British drinkers will associate with shooting weekends, is an intriguing item on a list, but you might not want a full serving of boozy beef soup with your meal. At home, a tinier measure can be a way to taste a prized spirit without the drink costing the earth.
For the people running bars and restaurants, tiny cocktails are a way to get the gears moving. The Connaught in Mayfair, routinely ranked among the best bars in the world, welcomes customers with a tiny measure of a seasonal cocktail served in its own cutesy glass. The menu at Rita's, in Soho, offers diners a 'mini Martini', served with a piquant but breath-cursing skewer of olive, blue cheese, anchovy and jalapeño pepper. At Tayēr + Elementary, in east London, they sell an average of 200 of their 'One Sip Martinis' every evening.
The fabled restaurateur Jeremy King, who has a menu of smaller 'sharpeners' at Arlington, his reborn Le Caprice, says he has long appreciated the more diminutive measure. 'We opened with half-sizes a year ago,' he says. 'I have often found I wanted one Martini, but two was too much, so one and a half was very good.' His sharpeners are all pre-mixed, diluted and chilled to icy perfection so they can be at the diner's lips in seconds, which he says helps convey 'generosity'.
'A tiny drink gets the wheels turning,' says Max Halley, of Max's Sandwich Shop in north London, which offers 'shots' of negroni. 'It starts people enjoying themselves without costing too much or being very much alcohol.'
Seen from a historical perspective, Tyler Zielinski says the current movement is a reversion, rather than an aberration. 'Historically, cocktail glasses were much smaller,' he says. 'If you go into a vintage shop, everything is port- or sherry-glass-sized, even the Martini-style glasses.'