In June 2012, the fountain in the Savoy Court was fi lled with 360 litres of Lorincz’s cocktail
added challenge, to fi nd an innova- tive way of serving it. After much thought, Lorincz came up with the Diamond Jubilee Punch (Lorincz had to send the name to the Palace for approval). It contains Bombay Sapphire gin, pink grape- fruit and orange shrub (a mixture of the zest and juice of the fruit and sugar), earl grey tea, almond syrup – “and, of course, champagne.” Lorincz took the challenge of coming up with an unusual way to serve the drink very seriously, agonising about it for weeks. “I wasn’t sleeping, I was thinking about it non stop,” he says. “I was on the way to Paris, brainstorming ideas, when suddenly it came to me.” When he returned from Paris, Lorincz asked The Savoy’s managing director Kiaran MacDonald to meet him in the hotel’s lobby. Perplexed, MacDonald agreed, and became even more confused when he was led out to the hotel’s forecourt.
“I pointed at the fountain outside of the hotel’s front entrance and said, ‘that’s where we’re going to serve the
ISSUE 2 2014 © cybertrek 2014
EARLY DAYS
“When the party guests wanted a cocktail, they just got a cup and scooped one out of the fountain. It was incredible”
cocktail from. He thought I was crazy, but that’s what we did.” On 3 June 2012, the Savoy Court
was closed and the hotel threw a street party for 120 of its regular guests. “I worked all night to make 360 litres of the cocktail,” says Lorincz. “I fi nished at 8am, then went to my room for a shower, before com- ing back downstairs for the start of the party at 9am.” The party fi nished at 5pm, and Lorincz immediately started his evening shift at the bar. So was it worth all the hard work? “The guests enjoyed themselves, had great food, and every time they wanted a cocktail, they just scooped one out of the fountain. It was incredible.”
After graduating from hospitality school in Slovakia in 1998, Lorincz spotted an advert for a cocktail competition being held in Prague. He attended the competition, real- ised he’d found his calling, and enrolled on a three month inten- sive bartending course in Prague to learn the trade. From there, he got a job in Slovakia’s fi rst cocktail bar (in Bratislava), where he stayed for three years, before deciding that if he wanted to really progress in his career, he needed to learn English. “I came to London and had to start from zero again,” he says. “I went to the TTI language school to learn English in the day, and worked in a club collecting glasses at night.” From here, he got a job as a bartender in Attica club in Soho, then the Japanese restaurant Nozomi in Knightsbridge, before joining the Connaught in 2008. It was when he won the title of
Bartender of the Year at Diageo’s World Class competition in 2010 that doors really started opening for Lorincz.
Read Leisure Management online
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