Words by: Ian Cameron

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Meat Mission

Address: 14-15 Hoxton Market, London N1 6HG, UK
Tel: Not listed
Hours: Tues-Sat 12pm-12am
Type: Cocktail bar

This Shoreditch offshoot of Meat Liquor takes over a former church hall in this cobbled square next to Hoxton Square. There's less graffiti and it feels more overtly designed, with a series of twisted stained glass images throughout the venue that nod to its religious past, lending this mission's fervour for meat and cocktails a practically evangelical dimension. Amen!

Drinks are served from behind a circular island bar made of interlocking metal panels that looks like a fairground attraction. Expect a similar menu to Meat Liquor, with a 12-strong list of well-conceived and simple drinks expertly executed without pretension and served alongside your choice of guilty pleasure, calorie-laden comfort food. Snigger-worthy names of drinks mask imaginative flavour combinations - the Donkey Punch mixing vodka, lime, ginger beer and absinthe, the powerful Game Over combining six types of alcohol (limited to two per person), most between £7 and £9.

A sense of fun pervades this concept, and extends to the food, perhaps articulated best by the choice of 'garbage' plates - imagine progressive layers of chips, chilli, burgers, cheese and mustard and it's a schoolboy's delight of grotesque but irresistible proportions. Might mean you avoid that kebab on the way home too! 4/5

UnderDog

Address: 51 - 55 Bethnal Green Road, London E1 6LA, UK
Tel: +44 (0)207 729 8476
Hours: Sun-Thu 12pm-12am; Fri-Sat 12pm-1am
Type: Cocktail bar

Basement bar in a speakeasy vein, UnderDog is below the Shoreditch BrewDog and reached by a hidden doorway from a stairwell to nowhere (if you can't find the cleverly hidden door). Behind cunningly hinged pictures is a low-lit and deliberately distressed-looking bar. BrewDog doesn't advertise the presence of this cocktail bar below: just ask to be "taken downstairs", ahem.

As befits the craft Scottish brewer - sorry, the post Punk-apocalyptic mother fu*ker of a craft brewery, as it describes itself - the drinks list remains beer-focused. And they've had some fun constructing a choice of twisted classic cocktails, giving a frothy, beery head to some old familiars. Everything from BrewDog's own pale ale, porter, flavoured stout and even the 32% Tactical Nuclear Penguin (the world's strongest beer) combine with homemade vermouths, cordials, reductions and foams, then paired with whiskeys, rums, brandies and gins. Cocktail names come laced with word-play that reference their mixological origins - Dead Pony-Groni, Snakebiterita, Boil Your Maker etc etc., most £8.

Are they any good? In some cases the imagination behind the ingredients is inspired, in others plain bizarre and over-complex, but all wake up your tastebuds to this unusual cocktail category. 3/5