Drink in Focus: Chinmoku at The Aubrey

The menu features eighteen distinct cocktails spanning three sections or approaches. The Elegant portion of the menu focuses on clean, focused flavours; the Refined focuses on layering and combining profiles; while the Imperfect embraces a wabi-sabi approach – adventurous combinations deftly executed. There are also highball expressions of these three concepts, as well as non-alcoholic options.

For a menu themed on quiet excellence, the selection seems rather maximalist – the menu includes combinations like pistachio, caramel and white miso, or peanut butter, Wagyu oil (made sustainably from scraps sourced from the kitchens of the hotel’s restaurants) and soy sauce. But subtlety is still Bussi’s modus operandi.

For example, the Chinmoku, from the menu’s Refined section, is based on the Japanese word for silence, stillness or reticence and focuses on a common Japanese ingredient – nori (seaweed). The drink combines gin, nori-infused shochu, The Aubrey’s own sake, Suze, green apple juice, camomile syrup and celery bitters. It’s a fitting name for a cocktail where we felt the nori’s umami-rich sweetness was the very last note on the palate.

“When developing the cocktail,” Bussi says, “we found out that the nori was actually ‘silent’ as it does not come through at the forefront of the cocktail but reveals itself after a few sips.”

To save the nori notes for last, Bussi used a gin (Tanqueray No. 10) and shochu split base to reduce the final alcohol content while maintaining a range of flavours he could bring to the forefront. The camomile notes from Tanqueray No. 10 were amplified by a camomile syrup, which was cold brewed with a 1:1 simple syrup using refined sugar.