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Himkok

Oslo

• Bareksten Best Bar Design Award 2024

When you realise that Himkok translates to moonshine (specifically homemade) in Norwegian, everything in this temple of drinks makes sense. This place goes deeper than your usual cocktail bar concept – it’s a showcase of Norway, from distillery to glass, with echoes of the same seasonality and localism of the New Nordic food movement.

It all starts at the still room, where potato spirit is rectified to produce vodka, gin and aquavit, piped into glass tanks in the bar and, from there, into the cocktails. Devised annually by Maroš Dzurus and team, the drinks are named by their principal ingredient – take Carrot Cake, Sea buckthorn or Quince as an example.

This year the new menu – Beats and Sips - goes a step further into Nordic culture, with each cocktail inspiring a song by a Norwegian artist in collaboration with Sony Music Norway. And all this – the cool, low-lit bar, distillery and brilliant drinks – is just one element of Himkok. If it’s warm enough outside, there’s a cider bar to try and, upstairs, a kegged cocktails space for vertical drinking. There’s also a lab full of the latest tech, an ice-making room, a small rick house for experimental ageing and, more unusually, a barber.

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