We got married in London in November 2016. A staffed bar was numbingly expensive and slow, so someone suggested bottled cocktails instead. We went round London tasting them. Everything we found had been built to a price. So we made our own, and on the day the team carried them through the crowd on trays, and when they were gone they were gone. Clemency still points out that more people commented on the drinks than on her dress.
We spent the months after being asked where to buy them, and there was nowhere to send anyone. So we registered the company in February 2017 and started making them properly.
We are named after Myatt's Fields, the Victorian park at the end of our road. Joseph Myatt grew strawberries and rhubarb on that land in the 1800s. William Minet, whose Huguenot family had fled France two centuries before, gave it to the neighbourhood in 1882, and it opened as a park in 1889, laid out by Fanny Wilkinson, one of the first professional women landscape gardeners in Britain. It fell into neglect, and in 1995 the people who live around it took it back. They run it still, without the council, and we are two of them. We give it our time, and the company gives it money every year out of what it makes. It is a good thing to be named after and a better thing to pay for.
What we make is finished, not mixed. A drink is made, then left to age for weeks, some of them for months, because time does something to a cocktail that speed cannot. The vermouth oxidises and softens. The edges come off. It goes on changing in the bottle. You pour it cold, from the freezer or over ice, and it tastes like it was made by someone who had all afternoon.
Ready to serve. Nothing to measure, nothing to mix. The Espresso Martini is the one that wants a hard shake, because the crema is the point.
There are two of us here, and we make everything by hand, just as if you were in our front room.
You will find us at Fortnum & Mason, in delis around the country, and here.
Email us at cocktails@myattsfields.london. We always answer.
Myatt's Fields Limited
Company Number 10595404
Upstall Street, London SE5 9JE
