Gourmet @home- Part 7, cocktail deliveries and mixology online courses at home from 5L Speakeasy Bar, Sofia
Cover image: Hemingway Daiquiri, ready-made cocktail deliveries from 5L Speakeasy Bar, Sofia
Reading time: 5 min.
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You don’t feel like reading this time? Go straight to the video further below – 1:22 min.
After posting a fairly comprehensive list of good restaurants that deliver food to an address, in a previous article Gourmet @home- Part 1, food deliveries in Bulgaria, I decided it was worth testing out how the delivery system works in Sofia and sharing my impressions.
In Gourmet @home – Part 6 , I described my impressions from the food delivery of Street Chefs and Ahora by Sevda Dimitrova.
As I’ve already explained in a previous post, each of the establishments I write about, deserves the maximum of 5 hearts from the 5D Sensograph, because of their courage to face the challenge of forced lockdown, but to find a way to stay close to their customers and indulge them with delicious food and drinks.
So, @home articles are a rating-free zone, which aims to promote and assist all restaurant entrepreneurs who were and still are prevented to practice their business as usual and maybe face difficulty maintaining it.
At the center of this consecutive story, Gourmet @home, are …….
5L Speakeasy Bar @home and its wonderful team.
The next bright red maximum 5 hearts assigned by the 5D Sensograph of placescases.com go to 5L Speakeasy Bar for their ready-made cocktail delivery and online mixology courses. They were the first bar to launch cocktail deliveries in Sofia. One night I wrote to them that I urgently needed 4 cocktails in a neighborhood outside the Foodpanda area. They came as an ambulance. They saved us! 😉
Here is the proof:
One sunny Saturday afternoon we decided to have a virtual cocktail party with friends. I ordered for both addresses and within 30 minutes we all had a wonderful drink in our hands.
Try it yourself – invite virtually your friends to a cocktail party. Order delivery to the addresses of everybody and contact through one of all the famous applications providing video conferencing. I already wrote about such an experience, but with dinner, and I shared it in the post: Do virtual dinners lead to domestic alcoholism?
In addition to the pleasure of drinking 5L Speakeasy Bar cocktails at home, we had the even greater pleasure of participating in their online mixology course. We signed up, they sent us a set of ingredients for 4 cocktails. We only got to add 4 glasses, a shaker, ice and a cocktail spoon.
See ….
…. Branded packaging of the ready-made cocktail deliveries-a large ice cube inside to keep the cocktail concentrated and cold until it arrives at the customer’s home;
…. Each package is labeled with the name of its contents – so there was no confusion about which cocktail is placed where;
…. If you still want to put it in a glass so that it has a refined look like in the bar, see the photo in the menu as a sample and find at home the closest to the shape of the cup given there;
…. For the online mixology course, we received a properly labeled cardboard box with small doses of alcohol, syrups, dried fruit decorations and a ginger ale. Each dose of product had a description of what it contained, as well as the name of the cocktail in which recipe it participated.
Hear ….
…. We didn’t talk about home orders over the phone, we wrote to each other on Facebook Messenger; the chat was fast, there was good coordination between the courier and the bar – perfect!;
…. During the video conference of the online course there was a relaxed atmosphere, with good mood, timely feedback on our performance, super adequate answers to the questions we asked in the chat. The presenters felt fluent with the video link app, as if they were doing it on a regular basis.
Feel ….
…. Friendly couriers, both times, with masks of course, payment by card – all in accordance with the requirements;
…. When they arrived, the ready-made cocktails were in perfect condition – the reason is the large ice cube, which does not melt quickly and maintains the concentration of the cocktail, in addition to cooling it;
I can’t help but mention “The Experience Economy” again, because the 5L online course is a unique experience that no other bar has offered to its customers in this way so far.
You can read about this theory in the publication What is Experience Economy and where can you find best examples in Bulgaria?, as well as in the following articles in the eponymous section of the blog.
The authors of this theory, James Gilmore and Joseph Pines, say that the customer experience has 4 main characteristics that, if combined in one, seal it in his/her memory, make him/her visit the place again and again, share with other people about it, making the best possible advertisement. To be such, an experience must be entertaining, educational, aesthetic, and escapist.
At the online course of 5L Speakeasy Bar, with the bartenders- mixologists Michail Pavlov and Plamen Rainev, we had a lot of fun. The pleasure of making a cocktail at home with professional products and instructions is irreplaceable. In addition, thanks to our lectors, we learned interesting things about the history of each drink, without taking away from the fun. We received useful tips on the techniques used to achieve a certain effect, as well as additional information on variations with egg whites or a recipes like that for honey syrup. We enjoyed our performance, besides, with true professional decoration.
For an hour and a half, along with Misho and Plamen, and several other fans of cocktail art, we forgot about the time, the pandemic and other troubles, captivated by the wonderful flavors of Whiskey Sour, Moscow Mule, Bee’s Knees and Colada Sour.
Smell ….
… .. Each delivered home cocktail had a specific combination of flavors – unique, each of them!
…. The cocktails from the online course carried aromas of tropics, summer and freshness!
Taste ….
…. From home deliveries,we tasted sweetness combined with fragrance in Churchill’s Dog, Belegzia and Cat’s Whiskers;
… However, we received a lot of freshness in Ritini, HemingwayDaiquiri and Silver Monk;
…. I liked the Moscow Mule and Whiskey Sauer from the course. Plamen and Misho were so kind to tell us how to do it in an egg whites version and I can’t wait to try it.
It’s great that 5L Speakeasy keeps in touch with mixology fans so elegantly. It is a pleasure to communicate with them through their works and personally with their team members.
Thank you, 5L, for being so inovative in difficult times, but also accurate in your deliveries. You are a true example of best practice in The Experience Economy because you are able to create memorable experiences for us, the clients!
You can see their delivery menu here.
Unfortunately, I cannot write about my impressions from restaurants and bars outside Sofia, but I believe that the places listed at Gourmet @home- Part 1 are doing great job, because I personally tested them on the spot and did not come across this blog just by accident, rather were specially selected for it.
Follow placescases.com here or on its social networks pages in Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter to see the articles from the new @home rubric, where I tell about my experiences with the delivery of other establishments that keep servicing their customers, although forced to close doors to them during the Covid 19 pandemic.
