From secret gardens to a Pepper Jet cocktail: How to celebrate World Paloma Day in London

If you’re a London connoisseur, you'll be au fait with the trio of secret London bars: Cahoots, Barts, and Control Room B. They are all vintage-style speakeasies dotted across the city, serving up excellent cocktails and the kind of vintage-kitsch London interiors Americans travel across the pond for. Basically, imagine if the musical Operation Mincemeat opened up a trio of bars, and you've pretty much got the gist of them.

In celebration of Paloma Day on 22nd May, you can visit any of these bars to enjoy a range of limited edition cocktails celebrating all things agave.

What are the bars like?

Cahoots (the original) is set in the long-forgotten, disused Kingly Court Underground station. It was once a 1940s air-raid shelter and became famous for being an illicit hideaway. After the war, it became even more scandalous - a place where rationing rules were flouted, bootlegged cocktails were smuggled and served, and people could party late into the night. And, they’ve kept that spirit alive well into 2025. Pretty cool, eh?

The Postal Office is their second venture - hidden behind a seemingly ordinary Post Office shopfront (unsurprisingly), you find yourself carousing back in that raucous 1940s hub. Plus, it has the world’s first pneumatic cocktail delivery system, which, contrary to its name, you don’t need an engineering degree to enjoy. They use the old postal sorting system using flying cylinders (think Harry Potter or 1930s secret service style), but instead of letters encased in the tubes, there are cocktails. What can we say, they really deliver...

Barts is the Chelsea outpost, originally a bootlegger's smuggling post that dates back to the prohibition era, so you’ll quite literally be drinking in history.

What's on offer?

Cocktails include a 'Pepper Jet' at Cahoots, which combines Don Julio Blanco tequila, chilli liqueur, yuzu and clementine sherbert, hot sauce and grapefruit soda. At Control Room B, there is a special Flor de Paloma, which is presumably a floral twist on a classic Paloma.

Dubbed ‘smuggled sunshine’, the limited edition cocktail at Barts bar is part of its Secret Agave Garden, where you’ll be seated in an urban jungle of agave plants, cacti, and planters, all lit up by lanterns and the evening darkens - lovely stuff.

What's actually in a Paloma?

For those unfamiliar with Palomas, where were you last summer when they took over all rooftop bars and Pinterest boards? A Paloma is a tequila-based cocktail which is most known for its grapefruit flavour.

It’s made with tequila, grapefruit juice, lime juice, agave (or sugar syrup), then topped with soda water. Imagine if you blended a margarita with a tequila lime soda and threw in a load of grapefruit too, and you’re not far off what a Paloma is. They're sort of like the Mexican equivalent of a Pimms.

When can you get your hands on one?

While the cocktails at Cahoots and Control Room B are celebrating Paloma Day, meaning they'll only be around until the end of May, the Agave Garden at Barts stays until October.

Even if you’re not looking to enjoy the Paloma Passport series that is on offer for World Paloma Day, it’s worth heading to the bars to experience a bar with a bit of a difference. Whether you’re sampling their Paloma specials or catching one of their many live music gigs, Cahoots, Control Room B, and Barts are altogether different kinds of bar experiences that are definitely worth adding to your London bucket list.

• Are you a whisky drinker whose a little bored of whisky? We've rounded up four alternative drinks to try out instead