From ice bars to underwater restaurants to Japanese sake houses where monkeys are waiters, we've seen a lot of gimmicky places to get a drink. However none so far have given us a headache just by reading about them until now. The Ritz-Carlton hotel in Berlin opened a perfume-inspired cocktail bar on June 12, and it's causing us to pause.
The bar, aptly named Fragrances, encourages patrons to select their cocktails based on matching scents. Fragrances currently offers a selection 15 cocktails, each corresponding to a different perfume. Designer perfumes from the likes of Giorgio Armani and Yves Saint Laurent sit beside respective liquors so that patrons may smell before they taste. “At Fragrances, we want our guests not only to enjoy their drinks, but to experience them,” bar manager Arnd Heissen told The Drinks Business.
Cocktails are as elaborate as the setup. The Earl Grey and Cucumber, for example, consists of Earl Grey infused Don Julio Reposado, pink lady apple juice, jasmine tea and vanilla, honey and cucumber syrup. It was inspired by the Jo Malone fragrance. Heissen told Yahoo Food that there have been no sponsorhip deals between the perfume companies and the Ritz Berlin, and that the hotel does not sell any of the perfumes.
Non-alcoholic beverages, like the Messe de Minuit and Penhaligon's Orange Blossom, are also available, as are fragrance-inspired bar snacks -- whatever those might be.
We're curious to see how Fragrances fares, since we've always followed the rule prohibiting scented candles on the dinner table. Perhaps we've been mistaken this whole time, though. For now, we're going to sit back and watch from a distance, because we're feeling all this perfume and cocktail talk right between the eyes, in a throbbing sort of way.
Typically we get headaches after we leave a bar -- like, the next morning when we wake up and need a Bloody Mary injection and an egg sandwich to the face. But before we even enter? We're not so sure we're ready for that. Would you go to a perfume-inspired cocktail bar? What perfume...er... cocktail would you choose?
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