42

M+MS Bar

Seoul

Seoul’s coolest new cocktail spot

Short for Malt plus Mixology, M+MS is the most experimental member of the family behind Le Chamber, the bookshelf-fronted Cheongdam speakeasy that World Class veterans JJ Lim and Louis Eom opened in 2014, and the contrast between the two rooms could hardly be sharper. Where the elder sibling deals in leather and chandeliers, the Dosan branch is raw concrete with a lacquered red bar and a DJ booth, presenting as a 'fermentation collective' that opens at two in the afternoon as a café, brews its own beer on site and styles itself less as a bar than a cultural space. There's even house merchandise stamped with the building's GPS coordinates, the same string of digits that runs along the bottom of every menu page.

Fermentation is the through line of a cocktail list that takes real risks and lands them. On the innovative side, Yama carbonates a base of sour kimchi broth with tuna fish sauce, fermented kiwi and anchovy soup, Heliot Emil turns a smoked salmon sandwich into a drink with soy, dill and wasabi in a nod to Copenhagen, and 032C reimagines Berlin currywurst as dessert through sausage-washed Jägermeister, turmeric and orange custard, a tribute to the magazine's BTS RM cover. The all-time favourites are gentler but no less considered, with Mogwa Atteseo?, a martini built on quince from the tree in the bar's own garden alongside house-fermented pear and wild kiwi wine and koji, and Green Fro 'Gang', a cocktail fermented like a beer that sits somewhere between wine and lager. Two house brews, a Berry Milk Stout and a Basil Wheat Beer, hold down the malt half of the name, tap cocktails keep the pace casual, and a kitchen of gochujang ragu pasta, lobster rolls and miso beef tartare means nobody drinks on an empty stomach. The coordinates on the merchandise read like a quiet boast, and on this evidence the point stands, since there is nowhere else in Seoul quite like this particular spot on the map.

Contact