Photos by Holly Li
Full disclosure: I’m predisposed to like George’s, the new bar at Parkview Green's Hotel Éclat.
A couple weeks ago, I met head bartender, Sami Mersel, at a party. I said: “Hey, I’m gonna freak you out for a second.” He said: “OK.”
I’d received a press release about him joining Eclat, so I knew who he was. And then I said that he’d worked at my favorite bar in Montpellier, France. And then I showed him the bar’s card, which I’d had in my wallet for years because it was my favorite bar in the whole wide world. Sami gushed happy profanities and raised his glass to mine.
Montpellier is a smallish city in Southern France, and Papa Doble is smallish bar on one of its smallish streets – a tiny cobblestone alleyway (the European equivalent of a hutong, if you will). Papa Doble made me my first adult cocktail: silky, complex, seductive. And while I was a 20-year-old boozing my way through my studies, Sami was a 20-year-old studying his way through booze behind the bar of my dreams. We never actually spoke in Montpellier, but a few years later, we somehow both ended up in Beijing: Sami making drinks, and me writing about people making drinks. It’s like a rom-com, except we’re not getting married. Maybe we should though?
So where were we? Right, this is a bar review, sorry. George’s. Sami’s bar in Eclat. It’s cool.
Parkview Green has long been lacking a proper bar. And man, is George’s a proper bar. In fact, it’s two proper bars – one accented with 19th-century bowler hats and a perfume-bottle motif, and another (made for whiskies) at the back, which overlooks the artsy shopping center through floor-to-ceiling windows.
Sami has crafted a shortlist of cocktails ranging from good to fantastic. We loved the creamy sweet chocolate martini (RMB80), but if your sweet tooth’s not as strong as ours, the delightful bell-pepper punch (RMB80) was interesting and… vegetal? I don’t know – just go try it for yourself, I suppose.
The bar is, objectively speaking, an excellent addition to Parkview Green and to Beijing’s F&B scene (I mean, just look at those tailored suits). But while the dude has won international bartending challenges aplenty, he now faces a challenge altogether different: drawing cocktail loungers away from Sanlitun. Will he succeed? Only time will tell.
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