Sasha Petraske's Poland Street speakeasy — the bar that started London's cocktail revival, closed in 2020.
Milk & Honey opened on Poland Street in 2002 as a London outpost of Sasha Petraske's New York members-only speakeasy. The Evening Standard reported the bar closed permanently in April 2020 after the first pandemic lockdown, ending an 18-year run that Punch's history of the modern cocktail revival credits as "the room that re-taught London how to make a classic cocktail." The page exists for readers searching the name; the venue is gone.
At its peak Milk & Honey ran as a members-only bar with strict house rules — no name-dropping, no phones, no asking what was good, no shouting — that the bar enforced with a politeness that became its trademark. The Guardian's 2020 closure feature placed the bar alongside Match Bar and Lab as the three rooms that produced London's first generation of modern cocktail bartenders.
The Poland Street space ran three floors. Difford's Guide's archived profile describes the ground floor as a small antechamber, the first-floor lounge as the main bar with leather banquettes and an unmarked door, and the second-floor private rooms as bookable for groups. The lighting was low, the music quiet by policy. Members and their guests rang a doorbell to enter.
There was no menu — the house style was to read the room and build a drink. Punch's oral history of Petraske's bars notes the Gimlet, the Daiquiri, and the Penicillin (Sam Ross's invention at the New York Milk & Honey) as the signature orders. Cocktails ran £12–14 in the bar's final years, with annual membership at £500.
Skip looking for the brand — Sasha Petraske died in 2015, the New York Milk & Honey closed in 2013, and the London site closed in 2020. No current bar trades under the name. The Petraske technique survives in his proteges' bars: Attaboy in New York, and in London via former staff at Happiness Forgets and Trailer Happiness.
Members were a mix of hospitality industry, journalism, and Soho regulars; the door policy and the no-phones rule kept the press at a distance. The Guardian notes that the bar's most lasting cultural effect was on bartender training: "a generation of London bartenders learned what good service felt like by working a Milk & Honey shift."