Heading towards the Tower Bridge area of London you will be greeted with a plethora of upmarket hotels, bars and restaurants all catering to the corporate clientele. These are often, sleek, chic and well…a little bland. It’s a ‘one size fits all’ mentality that can be restrictive. With TwoRuba being part of the Hilton Hotel you’d be forgiven for expecting this bar to carry on this trend, however the team here really know how to add some personality! Last week I headed over to the TwoRuba’s new Spring garden popup to check out their new spring/summer menu.
The bar does a really god job at walking the line between a classy, upmarket bar and a fun seasonal theme. The bar staff are experts and couldn’t do more to help, while the spring garden area that greats you as you walk in is cute and a great place to relax. It’s complete with grass and deck chairs for a truly sunny experience. If this isn’t to your liking you can find more traditional seating further into the bar.
Before we get onto the main event I just want to give a shout out to the amazing food. We were supplied with a hearty amount of nibbles, all of which were delicious, the chicken in particular I couldn’t get enough of. Im not going to go into too much detail as the bar itself doesn’t actually have a kitchen, but they do share a premises with the Jamie’s Italian next door and they can bring customers food over to the bar from there, a great idea!
TwoRuba have crafted four new cocktails for their spring menu, all of them unique so there is something for every taste:
Elderflower Breeze
Does it come any more refreshing then this? Even the name makes me feel relaxed. Containing gin, elderflower, lemon, cucumber and basil this drink is perfect for those warmer days. It’s the kind of thing i’d love to drink wile sunbathing in a park, completely British and just sweet enough to remain really fresh.
Raspberry and Thyme Smash
This Summery drink contains dark rum, raspberry, cranberry lime and thyme feels like the perfect drink to sip at the side of a pool. Unlike most poolside classics however this isn’t chock-full of surgery sweetness. The flavours are delicious, subtle and moreish. This was my personal favourite of the evening.
Spring Spritz
Containing tequila, St Germain, lemon, vanilla and mint the spring spritz isn’t something I would normally choose based on the tequila alone, it’s something I usually avoid. However the other flavours really balance it out, making it pretty easy to drink. It was reminiscent of a mojito but the mint hasn’t as over-powering as I find it to be in those.
The TwoRuba Cooler
Another drink to refresh your tastebuds, the TwoRuba Cooler consists of gin, Cointreau, apple, lemon, rose syrup and rosemary. As you can tell TwoRuba love combining their drinks with herbs for a fresh spring flavour. I’m not normally a gin fan but this strikes a great balance between just sweet enough and truly refreshing.
After we’d tried all four of these it was time for a little healthy competition. We were split into two teams and asked to try and make two classic cocktails. The first group got mojito, where as we got the classic Cosmopolitan. Now I’ve drank a few Cosmo’s in my time so I was feeling pretty confident. I knew the ingredients, knew how to chill the glass, the whole shebang, however as it turns out I am not so hot on my quantities. Ours ended up tasting like a vodka and lime juice mix, woops! So needless to say we weren’t the winners, making cocktails is much harder then it looks!
Thankfully we could leave it to the experts at this point to show us how it’s really done, and I spent the rest of my evening relaxing in a deckchair and drinking the (much better tasting!) cosmo!
Have you ever been to the TwoRuba? What’s your favourite cocktail?
Blogger City Swap: Visiting London
Blogger City Swap: Visiting Birmingham
Boxed Brownies: Review
West End Musicals Silent Disco Walking Tour Review
Leave a Reply