Banana Calling

Wayfinder

The Banana Calling is Dandelyan’s tribute act. Cameron Attfield built it on London’s South Bank in August 2018, during the bar’s final season as the world’s number one, as a house riff on Chris Jepson’s London Calling: gin, fino sherry and lemon, with banana liqueur threaded through the seams. The name declares the lineage and the banana declares almost nothing, which is the trick. Ten millilitres against forty of gin is seasoning arithmetic rather than a flavour statement. The liqueur’s cooked fruit rounds the sour’s middle while the fino’s salinity keeps the sweetness honest, and the two low notes merge into something neither bottle predicts on its own. The banana is barely findable without the name to point at it, and that restraint is the whole design. It is the modern school in miniature: a great bar honouring a great drink by changing ten millilitres and putting the credit in the title.

ShakenAperitif

Glassware: Nick & Nora Glass

Garnish: Banana chip pegged to the rim or a fresh slice

Ingredients

Serves

Gin

40ml

The inherited frame, London Dry exactly as the parent drink pours it. Clear juniper is what keeps the sour structural underneath the fruit and the sherry.

Banana Liqueur

10ml

The riff, dosed to a whisper. A modern craft bottle with cooked-fruit depth folds into the sherry; a neon-era one is front-loaded sweetness that reads as nothing at this measure.

Fino Sherry

7.5ml

The parent’s seasoning, trimmed to share the seam with the fruit. Saline, dry and green-almond, and it oxidises within days, so keep the bottle cold.

Fresh Lemon Juice

20ml

The acid line, a shade fuller than the parent takes, because there is now a sweet liqueur in the glass that has to be answered.

Simple Syrup

7.5ml

Rich two-to-one in the source spec, which makes for a short, dense balance. Standard syrup at 10ml reads the same in the finished drink.

Instructions

Add the gin, banana liqueur, fino, lemon juice and syrup to a shaker with ice.

Shake hard for 12 seconds.

Fine strain into a chilled Nick & Nora.

Peg a banana chip to the rim.

Expert Tip

The banana should whisper. If the drink announces the fruit before the name does, the pour ran heavy, and ten millilitres is genuinely the ceiling rather than a starting point. The bottle matters as much as the measure: modern craft banana liqueurs have real cooked-fruit depth and a bitterness at the edge, where the neon-era bottles are front-loaded sweetness with nothing underneath, and a whisper dose of the second kind reads as nothing at all. Trim the fino to 7.5ml as the spec does, to make room for the fruit, and keep the bottle in the fridge. Fino is a wine, it oxidises within days of opening, and a tired one takes the salinity out of the drink entirely.

Flavour Profile

BananaSalineLemonAlmondDry

The Origin

Cameron Attfield built it at Dandelyan on London’s South Bank in August 2018, in the bar’s final season as the world’s number one, as a house riff on Chris Jepson’s London Calling from 2002.

The tribute name follows the modern school’s courtesy of citing your sources in the title, which is a habit worth noticing. A generation earlier a bartender would simply have taken the frame and named the result something else. Putting the parent in the name makes the drink a piece of criticism as much as a recipe: here is a great drink, and here is the one thing I would change about it.

The Whisper Dose

Ten millilitres of banana liqueur against forty of gin is seasoning arithmetic, and it is a smaller dose than almost any modifier in a modern sour.

At that measure the liqueur’s cooked fruit rounds out the middle of the drink rather than sitting on top of it, and the fino’s salinity keeps its sweetness honest from underneath. The two low notes merge into something neither bottle predicts alone: fuller than a London Calling, faintly tropical, and impossible to name without the clue. Push it to fifteen and the drink starts announcing itself, which is precisely what the spec is trying to avoid.

The Fino Inheritance

The sherry measure comes down to 7.5ml to make room for the fruit, but its job is unchanged from the parent: salt, green almond and dryness, sitting under the gin and pulling the whole drink back from sweetness.

Fino is the ingredient most likely to fail here, because it is wine rather than a fortified liqueur in any useful sense. It oxidises within days of opening even in the fridge, and a bottle that has been standing since last month contributes a flat nuttiness instead of salinity. Buy half bottles, keep them cold, and treat them like white wine rather than like sherry.

The Banana Liqueur

The category has two distinct halves and only one of them works here. The neon-yellow bottles of the mid-century are front-loaded confectionery sweetness with a synthetic aroma, built for shots and blended drinks where volume covers for them.

The modern craft bottles are a different product: macerated and often distilled from real fruit, with cooked-banana depth, a faint bitterness at the edge and considerably less sugar. At ten millilitres only the second kind registers at all. The first simply disappears, taking the entire point of the drink with it.

How to Serve It

Cold, up, in a chilled Nick & Nora, with a banana chip pegged to the rim as the only signpost the drink offers.

Serve it after a London Calling if you have both, and name it second: let the table taste the difference before they are told what to look for. The two poured together are the cleanest possible lesson in how a riff can honour a frame, which is change almost nothing and credit everything.

The Spirit

Gin

A flavour requirement rather than a method. The law asks only that juniper be the predominant taste and that the spirit reach 37.5%, which leaves everything else on the botanical bill to the distiller and permits a gin that was never redistilled at all.

Learn more

Frequently Asked Questions

Who created the Banana Calling?

Cameron Attfield, at Dandelyan in London in August 2018. It is a riff on Chris Jepson’s London Calling, keeping that drink’s gin, fino sherry and lemon frame and threading a small measure of banana liqueur through it.

Does it taste of banana?

Barely, and that is the design. The ten-millilitre dose folds into the fino’s green almond until the name has to serve as the clue. What you get reads as a rounder, slightly stranger London Calling rather than a banana cocktail.

What banana liqueur should I use?

A modern craft bottle with real cooked-fruit depth and some bitterness at the edge. The neon-era liqueurs are front-loaded sweetness with nothing underneath, and at a whisper dose they contribute nothing to the drink at all.

Why does my version taste flat?

Usually the fino. It is a wine and it oxidises within days of opening, even refrigerated, and a tired bottle contributes a dull nuttiness instead of the salinity that holds the sweetness in check. Buy half bottles and keep them cold.

Master the Techniques

How to Shake a Cocktail Like a Pro

London Calling

London Calling is a gin sour with fino sherry in it, and the sherry is doing the job salt does in cooking. Fifteen millilitres is not enough to taste as sherry. It is enough to dry the finish, deepen the middle and make the lemon read sharper than it otherwise would. It is credited to Chris Jepson, who built it at MASH in London in 2002, and named for the Clash record. That date matters: it is roughly a decade ahead of the point at which fino became a fashionable thing to have behind a bar, and the drink is routinely named as one of the things that started the shift. The result is a sour with its collar up. Dry, mineral and considerably more serious than a gin sour has any obligation to be, and the sort of drink to put in front of someone who has told you they do not like sherry, without mentioning what is in it.

Daiquiri

The Daiquiri is a sour in its most elemental form: white rum, fresh lime juice and sugar syrup, shaken and served up. Three ingredients, no bitters, no liqueur, nothing to hide behind. It takes its name from a mining district on the south-eastern coast of Cuba, near Santiago, where Jennings Cox, an American mining engineer, is credited with combining local white rum with lime and sugar around 1898. Whether Cox invented it or documented what Cuban workers had been drinking for years is not something the record can resolve. What is not disputed is that it was refined and popularised in Havana at El Floridita by Constantino Ribalaigua Vert. The simplicity is the point and the problem at once. There is nothing in the construction to compensate for a poor rum, juice that was not squeezed fresh, or a syrup made carelessly. Every variable is fully exposed, which is why a properly balanced Daiquiri demonstrates more skill than a ten-ingredient tiki drink.