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The famous green sign of the Savoy is proving irresistible to the creme de la creme of London's top hospitality talent

Not content with outshining rival luxury London hotels with its £220m renovation and some of the city’s most expensive suites, the Savoy also appears to have taken its pick of some of London’s best hospitality talent.

Avid watchers of the new fly-on-the-wall Savoy documentary which has just been shown on UK television will already be familiar with Mr Sean Davoren – holding the job of Head Butler – who has been one of its stars.

Mr Davoren is a charming Irishman and a natural born butler.  But he spent some 14 years at the Lanesborough building up his experience and refining his skills.  There he headed up the team of butlers working under the wing of one of London’s most respected hoteliers, Mr Geoffrey Gelardi.

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Mr Davoren’s successor, the equally suave Daniel Jordaan, recently shared his own expert packing tips with London Hotels Insight.

The Savoy has clearly been carrying out its recruitment in the premier league of hospitality talent, because it also managed to headhunt the talented Erik Lorincz – who stormed off with the Diageo Reserve World Class Bartender of the Year 2010 prize, ahead of some 9000 rivals.

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Head Bartender Mr Erik Lorincz at The Savoy's American Bar

He is a man who spends months obsessively honing his skills and perfecting his drinks – including reputedly one of the best Bloody Marys in London.  Until very recently he was plying his trade at the Connaught Bar (also one of the top London hotel bars) – but he too has now upped sticks to the Savoy’s American Bar where he is Head Bartender.

Among Mr Lorincz’s signature drinks is the dazzling Rising to the Sky cocktail (fresh coriander, camomille, grapefruit and orange bitters, juniper berries macerated in hot water and poured over dry ice, garnished with botanical steam) which won him the Diageo prize.  It’s not on the menu but you can ask him to make you one if you visit the Savoy’s American Bar.

What then is behind the magnetic pull of the Savoy?

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Its rich history certainly plays a part as well as the opportunity to help write a new chapter in the life of one of London’s premier Art Deco hotels.  Jobs at the Savoy are clearly some of the hottest tickets around.

It seems that all’s fair in love and war and in London hotel recruitment!

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Photo credits: Savoy Hotel.

The Cavendish Hotel's bar is one of the most underrated bars in London…and its bartender Warryn recently taught our blogger Andrea how to mix great cocktails

I always thought you needed to shake a cocktail.  And James Bond, of course, likes his Martini ‘shaken, not stirred’.  But according to Warryn who mixes cocktails at the stylish Cavendish (and recently revealed hotel bartenders’ favourite London bars), that’s the last thing you should do.

“Not shaking,” he says,  “swirling.  You want to get it going round and round, not just up and down, swirling it around and cooling it down nicely.  You shake it too hard, you break up all the ice, which is not nice.”

I was watching Warryn make a Smoky Rose – though my favourite is probably Long Island Iced Tea, I’d seen this on the menu and decided to give it a try.  It’s a tricky cocktail to make – first of all the glass has to be coated with agave syrup, then you set light to a rosemary sprig and invert the glass over the top so the smoke infuses the syrup.

Only when you’ve done that can you get on to the mixing part of the cocktail – using Herradura tequila as the base.

Not Jose Cuervo, Warryn told me.  “This Herradura is good, don’t drink anything else. Same with rum, Bacardi’s no good, you want Havana Club 7. You can’t really beat Cuban rum.”

The huge selection of bottles on the bar does include the less favoured brands, as some people ask for them, but you could drink your way through the rums for two evenings and still not finish – Captain Morgan, Mount Gay, Captain Morgan; light rum, dark rum… Warryn recommends Sailor Jerry too.

So lesson one, for me is to always seek out the right ingredients – and that doesn’t mean a bottle of Tesco’s own brand!

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There is an art to making a good cocktail - which depends a lot on buying good quality ingredients and perfecting tiny little details

I notice Warryn doesn’t use a measure for the liquids – he just pours them in.  “It’s in our heads,” he says; he and his colleagues experimented recently to see how accurate they were, and their measures were spot on (for those interested, if a mixed drink contains three or more drinks, it’s exempt from the usual weights and measures regulations).

Then the swirling – a little element of theatre, almost, as Warryn caresses the cocktail shaker into a gentle figure-of-eight loop.  I can hear the cocktail slurping and gurgling inside.  Finally it’s ready; the glass turned right way up again, the cocktail poured in, two straws and – most important – the garnish, a single sprig of rosemary laid across the glass.

“We try to garnish every drink we do,” Warryn says.  “That’s the barman’s signature.  And it makes people happy when they see a good garnish.”

Now I’ve always been a bit puritan about garnishes, perhaps because when I grew up, ‘garnish’ meant a half a tomato and a stale lettuce leaf, or a huge sprig of parsley and it was something you never ate – it was always left on the plate.  So I wonder what people do with their garnishes?

“85 percent of people eat it!”  Warryn tells me.  Maybe not the rosemary or the chilli, but if it’s fruit it disappears.  I can see why – the garnishes include blackberries, strawberries, red onion for the Bloody Mary (something I’ll definitely try at home – as is the addition of lime juice to the cocktail), huge gleaming red chillies; they look good and I’m sure they taste good.

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As well as having a great bar and a fantastic central London location on Jermyn Street, the Cavendish is also one of London's most eco-friendly hotels

So there you have it; how to mix the perfect cocktail.  Lots of ice.  Good ingredients (if you can get the night porter to squeeze all your orange juice in advance, as the Cavendish does, you’ve really got it made).  Swirl and don’t shake.  Garnish it nicely.  It sounds easy.  I have a feeling that doing it for a living might be just a bit more challenging than it sounds!

The Cavendish hasn’t always been noted for its cocktails and the way the bar is tucked away out of sight of the lobby doesn’t do it any favours; lots of guests just walk on by.  But the cocktail menu and the attention to detail are impressive – and the bartenders exceptionally friendly.  The prices are also reasonable compared to the best London hotel cocktail bars.

And how was the cocktail?  Need you ask?  Absolutely delicious of course!

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If you enjoyed this post you might also enjoy our review of the American Bar at the Stafford or Antonio’s martinis at Egerton House Hotel.

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Photo credits: Cavendish Hotel.

The painted ceiling at the Banqueting House in Whitehall has witnessed a remarkable history (Image credit below)

He stepped out through the window on to the scaffold.  Whitehall was crowded.  It was a January afternoon and bitterly cold.  He said goodbye to his daughter.  He lay full length with his head on the low block; he lifted his hands to give the signal.  A single blow of the axe took off his head.

Charles I was beheaded on January 30th, 1649, and his death marked the end of a golden period in English art and architecture.

Nothing would be the same again.  Under Charles, foreign artists had been brought to London, English noblemen had started collecting antiquities and paintings on the Continent and the culture of the Renaissance had finally chased out the last shreds and patches of Gothic style.

Ironically, the Banqueting House, from one of the windows of which he stepped on to the scaffold, was one of his and his father James I’s greatest works of patronage; the first truly neo-classical building in the country.  It was also one of architect Inigo Jones’s greatest works.

James I hired Jones to build the Banqueting House as an addition to the ramshackle, medieval Whitehall Palace (Jones created plans for an entirely new palace, in fact, but only this part of it was ever built).

The elegant facade is clearly Renaissance in style, with huge windows, its classical vocabularly of pediments, columns, balustrade, its flat roof (not the steeply pitched roof common in England up to that date), its firm rectangular outline.  Everything is precise, poised and a little understated.

Inside, that feeling of classical proportion continues; the main room is a double-cube; even if you don’t know that, the geometrical form creates a feeling of calm and monumentality.  It’s not too tall, wide or long but just right – a perfection of proportions.  Charles added the crowning touch.  To this restrained Renaissance interior he added a full-on baroque touch – the painted ceiling.

Charles was a connoisseur and admirer of Spanish and Netherlandish painting of his time and had determined to be more than just a collector.

He wanted to be a patron; but first needed to lure one of the great artists to England.  Rubens took the bait; and the Banqueting House was decorated with a Stuart mythology – the divine right of kings, illustrated by the apotheosis of James I.

It’s an amazing work.  What’s more amazing is that it shows James I exactly as a Catholic saint would be shown, being taken up to heaven.  And by waving his infant son Charles on to the throne, the figure of James is passing on that spiritual authority.

This was not a message calculated to appeal to English parliamentarians – and it was not expressed in a way that would appeal to many Protestants.  In short, this was Charles throwing down the gauntlet.

So I wonder whether the choice of the Banqueting House as the venue for Charles’s execution was deliberately, defiantly planned to show how all these values had been overthrown – to show that this was not only the death of a king, but the end of the entire political, religious and artistic programme of the Stuart monarchy?

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Photo credits: Rev Stan’s photostream.

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