Alma de Cuba

Address: St Peter's Church, Seel St, Liverpool, L1 4BH , United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)151 702 7394
Website: view Alma de Cuba’s website
Style: Cocktail bar
Food: Set menu

Review

A bar set in a deconsecrated church, where they throw petals over the drinkers from the mezzanine above at a set time each day: Alma de Cuba has some claim to being 'Liverpool's most spectacular restaurant and bar'. Its former guise as a Catholic church saw Mother Theresa attend mass here, though it closed in the late '70s after a two-hundred year history at the heart of its now-defunct parish.

Alma de Cuba has retained much of what makes a bar in a former church such an enticing idea - a grand dais where the altar would have been, frescos, candelabra, stained glass windows, Latin inscriptions, even live Gospel on a Sunday. It has been subject to an impressive rebuild that has seen the construction of a mezzanine floor with restaurant, while the bar runs the length of the space downstairs. The menu suitably contains Ten Commandments - rules for ordering drinks.

Despite the fact it becomes something of a party venue, and has a reputation for some glitzy events, it can still be relied upon to produce a decent drink. Most of the menu is made up of crowd-pleasing sweet and fruity little numbers, with an emphasis on flavoured rum and cachaca cocktails (as befits its Cuban-influenced theme), but they carry the classics too and ask all of the right questions when you order one.