Scarfes cocktail menu

To create a collectable menu that promoted a new cocktail collection at Scarfes bar.

Response

Each new cocktail had been inspired by a specially commissioned cartoon by Gerald Scarfe. Our aim was to create a menu using those cartoons in such a way that reflected both the clubby, book-filled bar and the maverick nature of the cartoonist himself. Our response needed to be new and dynamic. The menu had to give space to Scarfe’s cartoons and the cocktail ingredients needed to be legible under the dim light of the bar.

We came up with the idea of using an old cocktail book – one that may have been around when the bar’s Holborn home was first built – which Gerald had seemingly picked up and defaced. It was to be ‘his’ book. It was to be as if he had scrawled over and ripped the pages, drawn cartoons for his own cocktails over the existing text, and left his own ephemera stuffed into it – an old bar bill, a post-it note, a postcard.   We used a potted history of London from 2000- 2018 as a framework for the book on to which we could peg an appropriate cartoon cocktail for each year. Like the cartoons, the tone also needed to be witty and irreverent.