Why Artesian matters.
Artesian is a pioneering cocktail bar where Marylebone's grand-hotel culture meets David Collins's richly layered design, a four-year reign atop The World's 50 Best Bars and Giulia Cuccurullo's ingredient-driven approach to modern mixology.
Set within The Langham along Portland Place near Regent Street and just steps from All Souls Church, the bar occupies the hotel's ground floor amid John Nash's expansive streetscape, nineteenth-century institutional architecture and the commercial intensity surrounding Oxford Circus. David Collins Studio shaped the room through high ceilings, deep purple leather seating, gilded surfaces, ornate chandeliers and Asian decorative influences developed around the hotel's English heritage and Hong Kong ownership. Bay windows bring daylight into an interior that becomes progressively more enclosed after dark, with low tables and curved seating creating intimate drinking zones beneath the room's substantial ceiling height. The long bar establishes the principal working focal point, placing preparation within view as drinks move between precise bartending and table service across the lounge. The result is a cocktail bar whose opulent hotel architecture, distinctive purple furnishings and highly visible bar counter give technically ambitious drinks the ceremonial setting that has accompanied Artesian through successive generations of bartenders.
What defines Artesian.
Artesian is best known for becoming one of the most influential cocktail bars of the 2010s under Alex Kratena and Simone Caporale, whose team secured The World's Best Bar title for four consecutive years from 2012 through 2015. The bar opened in January 2007 during The Langham's major refurbishment, with David Collins Studio creating its interior as part of a wider transformation initially budgeted at £50 million. Its name came from the 360-foot artesian well beneath the hotel, which had supplied water when The Langham opened in 1865 as Europe's first grand hotel. Czech-born Kratena joined during the renovation period and served as head bartender from 2007, approaching the traditional luxury-hotel bar as a platform for increasingly unconventional cocktail development. Italian bartender Caporale joined him after arriving in London in 2009, and the pair built annual menus that pushed presentation, custom vessels and preparation techniques far beyond established hotel-bar conventions. Kratena introduced equipment including a slush machine for fresh-fruit frozen drinks, commissioned a proprietary vermouth from Martini & Rossi and developed cocktails served through bespoke objects ranging from a Czech spa cup to a mirror construction inspired by Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Caporale's five years at Artesian also brought him the International Bartender of the Year title at the 2014 Spirited Awards. Kratena and Caporale departed in November 2015 with several members of their team, ending the creative period responsible for the bar's four consecutive global titles. Subsequent leadership included Remy Savage before Giulia Cuccurullo joined Artesian in 2018 and advanced through the team to become head bartender. Cuccurullo won the UK Patrón Perfectionists competition in 2019 and its global title in 2020, then led a new creative period built around collaborative workshops and ingredient research. Her team introduced Ingredients of the Future in 2023 as the first volume of a three-part Futureproof series, followed by Alter Ego and the concluding Ultimo in 2025. Artesian connects the theatrical experimentation of Kratena and Caporale with Cuccurullo's ingredient-led research, sustaining a cocktail institution whose international stature has survived major changes in personnel and creative direction.
Giulia Cuccurullo's Ultimo program begins with one ingredient per drink and subjects that ingredient to preservation, infusion, clarification, fat washing or other transformations until it can reshape a recognizable cocktail structure. Mulberry demonstrates the process through fruit fermented for two days with water, sugar and salt before fine filtration and agave convert the resulting liquid into a syrup, giving the Margarita-derived serve a prepared fruit component whose acidity and sweetness have been altered before tequila enters the glass. Parsnip takes the principle into a richer register by combining the root with coffee, brandy, amaro and buttered vodka, the latter produced by blending browned butter into vodka before chilling separates the fat and leaves its flavour behind. Pine needle moves in another direction through whisky infused with the needles in a Thermomix and vacuum bag, extracting resinous woodland aromatics into the spirit over 24 hours. Jerusalem artichoke relies on preservation, cooking the sliced tuber in rice vinegar, sugar and salt before an overnight rest, blending and fine straining turn the pickled vegetable into a sweetened liquid component. Kale demonstrates how little visual resemblance needs to survive between raw ingredient and finished drink, entering a dry Martini structure with vodka, amber vermouth and sake so vegetal savoriness becomes part of a familiar spirit-forward format. Cep pushes the same strategy toward umami through a Negroni variation incorporating mushroom and blue-cheese notes, using savory flavours that normally belong to food to alter the bitterness and aromatic weight of the classic template. Currant returns to brighter territory through bergamot and Champagne in a Paloma-derived serve, letting fruit acidity and sparkling wine replace the denser textures developed elsewhere in the list. Apple shifts again toward pastry associations by joining whisky, cognac, amaretto and brut Champagne around flavours intended to recall apple crumble, showing how the spotlight ingredient can determine both technique and the drink's broader reference point. Artesian builds Ultimo through repeated transformation of a single ingredient, making fermentation, infusion, pickling, fat transfer and culinary association the connecting logic between sixteen cocktails whose finished forms range from Martinis and Margaritas to Negronis and sparkling drinks.
How Artesian fits.
Artesian works as the concluding bar for an evening connecting a private collection transformed into a national museum, a piano manufacturer's purpose-built recital hall and Frank Matcham's enduring palace of popular entertainment.
Begin at Wallace Collection, where four generations of Marquesses of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace assembled exceptional holdings of French eighteenth-century painting, furniture, porcelain, Old Masters and arms and armour. Richard Wallace inherited the 4th Marquess's unentailed property in 1870, brought major portions of the collection from Paris to London and expanded it with medieval and Renaissance objects before moving into Hertford House in 1875. Lady Wallace bequeathed the collection to Britain in 1897, and the former family residence opened as a public museum in 1900 after stables, coach houses and private rooms were converted into galleries. Continue to Wigmore Hall, built by German piano manufacturer C. Bechstein and opened as Bechstein Hall on 31 May 1901, when Ferruccio Busoni performed Beethoven during the inaugural concert. Thomas Edward Collcutt designed a 550-seat room with mahogany panelling, Numidian marble pilasters and a cupola decorated by Gerald Moira and Frank Lynn Jenkins, establishing an unusually intimate architectural setting for chamber music. Wartime measures forced the German-owned property to auction in November 1916, when it sold for £56,500, and the renamed Wigmore Hall presented its first concert in January 1917 before becoming one of London's principal recital venues. Conclude at London Palladium, constructed in 1910 by Walter Gibbons on a site previously used for circus entertainment and ice skating before Frank Matcham reshaped it as a theatre of varieties. Variety, pantomime and moving pictures dominated its early decades, George Black assumed control in 1928 and Val Parnell later turned the theatre into a television institution through Sunday Night at the London Palladium, broadcast from 1955 to 1967. Its stage has connected Edwardian variety with broadcasting, musical theatre and large-scale popular entertainment across more than a century. The progression moves from private collecting opened to the nation through a recital hall created by the commercial power of piano manufacturing and culminates in Matcham's great variety theatre, establishing an evening of art, music and performance before Artesian extends that tradition of crafted presentation into the cocktail glass.
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