Inside 'The Bar in Front of the Bar's' Cocktail Pantry

What’s inside one of the world’s best bars? At Athens’ The Bar in Front of the Bar, the answer begins with the sort of ingredients that make a cocktail sound briefly like dinner.

For Scene Eats’ Inside One of the World’s Best Bars, co-founder Konstantinos Theodorakopoulos opened up the travelling pantry behind the drinks the team brought to Cairo, where The Bar in Front of the Bar took over Studio Samara for the closing night of Cairo Food Week 2026.

There was Ali Bomaye, built from berries, porcini mushrooms and miso paste, all filtered through white chocolate and Greek milk before whisky entered the equation. Then came the remnants of citrus brought from Greece, dried into a powder and mixed with salt to rim a Paloma. Rather than salt alone, Theodorakopoulos explained, the mixture brings acidity and citrus back into the drink—finding another use for something that would otherwise have been left behind. The Paloma itself travelled a little further between the two countries. Its cordial used strawberries arriving at the end of their season in Greece, alongside beetroot and hibiscus, ingredients chosen with Egypt in mind. Elsewhere, Rashomon Effect pared things back to gin, cucumber, mint and shiso.

It is a useful glimpse into how The Bar in Front of the Bar thinks: a cocktail can begin with a mushroom, yesterday’s citrus can become tomorrow’s garnish, and a drink carried from Athens to Cairo need not arrive entirely unchanged.

For one night at Studio Samara, what was inside one of the world’s best bars was not simply a collection of bottles brought over from Greece. It was a small edible record of where the bar had come from—and where it had landed.