The first thing to know about Drink Kong is that it does not look like a bar in Rome. The lighting is mostly red and blue; a wall of CRT televisions plays cuts from Akira and Blade Runner; the bartenders wear black, the seats are mid-century plastic, and the soundtrack runs from synth to dub depending on the hour. There is nothing Roman about any of it - which is, in its way, the most Roman thing about it, because Rome's cocktail scene has spent the last decade trying very deliberately to escape the Roman cocktail cliché.
Patrick Pistolesi opened Drink Kong in 2018 after a long career in London. He brought back what he had learned in the better London bars (clarified milk punches, sake-and-soju cocktails, fat-washed spirits, batched drinks served at speed) and grafted it onto a Tokyo-by-way-of-Italo-Calvino aesthetic. The result was the bar that pulled Rome onto the World's 50 Best list for the first time, sat there for years, and re-set what the city's drinkers expected from a cocktail menu.
The room sits on Piazza di San Martino ai Monti, in a corner of Monti that was scruffy ten years ago and is now full of small wine bars and natural-wine restaurants. The Kong menu is divided by mood rather than spirit - a section called Beasts for the more aggressive drinks, Spirits for the stirred and spirit-forward, a section of sodas and lower-ABV cocktails for the early part of the evening. Eat first - the bar food is good, but it is not designed to be a meal. Arrive hungry and you will end up overspending.
Skip straight to the Beasts section if you have been to a serious cocktail bar in the last five years and want to know what Kong does that nobody else does. The clarified-milk-punch riff on a Tom Collins is the bar's standing signature; ask the bartender which one is current. From the stirred section, the Roman Negroni - vermouth di Torino, Cynar, gin, an Italian bitter - is the drink that quietly makes the case for the bar being a Rome bar after all. Finish on something low-ABV; the soda programme is more accomplished than it looks.
Loud-ish, but not noisy. The crowd skews younger and more international than the Jerry Thomas Project; it is the bar that the city's twenty-somethings book for a date when they want to impress without trying to. Sundays and Mondays are the quiet evenings, Friday and Saturday fill from 10pm. The bar staff are happy to keep recommending if you say yes to whatever they suggest first. Tip is appreciated, not expected.
Nearby in Rome: Gatsby Cafè.
Nearby in Rome: Blackmarket Hall in Rome.
