Walked Via dei Banchi Vecchi from Piazza Navona. The door is in a courtyard you only see if you are looking for it, marked with nothing more than a small brass plate. Inside: leather, low lighting, what looks like a private club but is in fact a working cocktail bar with a thirty-seat capacity and a deliberately quiet attitude about its own reputation. Andrea Maccone, the bartender on shift, recognised the friend I was with from another bar and started us off with a Vermouth Bianco split with a house grappa-and-honey shrub. Drink number one.
The Yard reads, on first visit, as the cocktail bar a Roman lawyer goes to after a long Monday. The menu is short - eight house cocktails, four classics done well, a small dessert-cocktail section that lands better than you would expect. The pace is slower than Drink Kong, more conversational than Jerry Thomas. Pricing puts it in the higher tier (drink number two arrived as a stirred Old Cuban variation built around an amaro from Abruzzo, €17), which is what you pay for the calm.
Drink three was off-menu. I told Andrea I wanted something with cherry and rye; he made a Manhattan with a homemade Marasca cherry vermouth and a single drop of cocoa bitters. Not the best cocktail I have had in Rome but maybe the best ten-minute conversation about a cocktail I have had in Rome.
Verdict: book the corner banquette, allow ninety minutes, do not arrive after 10.30pm if you want the room quiet.
House Vermouth Bianco split. The opening order. Their house aromatised vermouth is poured with a grappa-honey shrub and a lemon twist. The drink that explains the bar.
Anything stirred from the regional Italian section. Maccone and the team rotate amari from across the Italian regions; ask which one is current and which classic they would build around it.
Whatever they suggest after the second drink. The Yard is one of the few rooms in Rome where it pays to put yourself in the bartender's hands by drink three. Tell them what you have liked so far.
The Yard does not have a phone listed publicly; reservations are by email or through their Instagram DMs - it is part of the bar's deliberate friction. They are happy to seat walk-ins early in the evening, before 9pm. The room closes around 1.30am on weeknights, later on Friday and Saturday. Closed Sundays.