Cato

Cato opened in Seven Dials this year naming itself after Cato Alexander — born enslaved in New York, freed in 1799, and widely credited as America’s first celebrity bartender — and the history isn’t just a menu footnote; the whole julep-focused upper room is built as a direct tribute to him.

It’s an ambitious opening, and mostly earns the ambition — a genuine addition to Mercer Street rather than just another Seven Dials bar trading on footfall.

The Room

Genuinely two rooms with two different personalities rather than one bar with two floors. Upstairs — The House of Julep — is bright, sociable, New York-inspired, and built around a single signature format. Downstairs is darker, more cerebral, and structured around its own themed cocktail menu.

Reviewers have consistently described it as “a bar of two halves,” and that’s the right way to think about a visit: pick the half that matches the night you’re actually having, rather than trying to do both.

What to Order

Upstairs, the julep is the only sensible order on a first visit — served in a frosted metal cup with mint grown on-site through an in-house growing system, and reworked from the traditional recipe with a house-made mint tincture and extra dilution rather than left as a straight period-piece copy.

It’s popular enough that the bar has reportedly served 160 in a single Saturday sitting, which says something about how well the simplicity has landed. Downstairs, the “Colour Has Flavour” menu groups fourteen drinks across seven colour-coded pairs — the “Brown” (medlar and mushroom, built on Scotch and smoked Cornish tea) and “Green” (pea-pod vodka and south Devon jalapeño liqueur) are the two most talked-about combinations and worth ordering specifically rather than picking blind.

The Drinks List

The julep programme upstairs is deliberately narrow and confident about it — this is a room that picked one drink and committed, rather than hedging with a full menu. Downstairs trades that focus for genuine range, organised by colour rather than spirit or era, which makes it easier to order adventurously without needing to already know what you like.

The colour-coded organising principle downstairs is a genuinely useful ordering shortcut rather than a gimmick once you’re a couple of rounds in — naming a preference by hue rather than by spirit (“something in the green family” rather than trying to describe a flavour profile from scratch) turns out to be an easier way to communicate what you actually want next, and staff clearly know their own map of it well enough to steer confidently.

What You Will Pay

Cocktails sit in the mid-teens upstairs and slightly higher downstairs for the more involved builds — standard for a serious Covent Garden opening of this ambition, not a premium over what the format and location would suggest.

The Verdict

Start upstairs for the julep if it’s a first visit — it’s the simpler, more immediately legible experience and the one the whole concept is built around — then go downstairs later in the evening once the room’s energy shifts, rather than trying to plan a single seamless visit across both.

Seven Dials didn’t obviously need a five-storey cocktail concept, but Cato’s specific point of view (one signature drink done seriously, one themed menu done playfully) justifies the scale better than most big openings manage. That’s a four-star rating for a bar that treats a night out here as closer to dining out than a quick round of drinks.

What’s Being Said

Naming a bar after cocktail history’s first documented celebrity bartender is a big claim to make on opening week. Cato backs it up more than it doesn’t — the julep programme in particular reads as a genuine tribute rather than a marketing hook, which is the harder thing to pull off.

At roughly 2,200 square feet across two floors with a hundred covers, Cato opened bigger and more ambitiously than most Covent Garden bar launches attempt, and the format justifies the scale rather than feeling like space filled for its own sake — each floor genuinely earns its own identity instead of reading as an overflow room for the other.

Seven Dials already has plenty of bars competing for passing theatre-crowd trade; Cato’s actual advantage is that neither half of it is built primarily for that crowd, which is worth knowing before turning up expecting a quick pre-show drink rather than a proper sit-down.