The Two Minute Review: The Sackville Lounge

Ronan Doyle
May 13
2 min read

Updated: Jun 3

What should we know about The Sackville Lounge?

You might have been resident under a rock if you don’t know already. The second site from the team who gave us Bar 1661 back in 2019 opened to much fanfare and no small ambition last month, sprucing up an old boozer off O’Connell Street with a black-panelled promise to bring a little glamour back to the much-maligned North city centre.

What should we have?

After slipping in at opening time (it's walk-ins only) we made straight for the Irish Coffee - a Tullamore Dew twist on 1661’s iconic Belfast Coffee and, to our whiskey-loving lips, a step up on it thanks to the added notes of soda bread and Kerrygold. There’s the faint hint of a hot buttered rum to this warm serve sipped through the layer of cream on top – we may have started with it, but here’s the best new digestif in town.

Versus its established elder sibling, The Sackville Lounge skews more classical in style, with a menu that might be mistaken for many others about town - perhaps the better to tempt in the city centre crowds that began to fill up around us. The devil’s in the detail though, and he’s in the spicy margarita too – there’s heat here to show those pale imitations how its done. There’s also great complexity, courtesy of Bán Poitín and Empirical Cilantro - as a comparison point to showcase the standard of the place, you won't do better. We reckon they can do better than cheap napkins for coasters though - at the tenth time of peeling a soaked serviette from our glass we were close to a wail.

This is a bar to reinforce your preferences - Campari fans will love the bitter blast of the Kingston Negroni, toned down with spiced vermouth and Caribbean rum, while those who take their cocktails sweetly sharp will sing the praises of the Strawberry Swizzle’s white chocolate and aged rum richness.

Those who think whiskey is the start and end of it all will feel right at home here, between the bar-flanking cabinets of owner Dave Mulligan’s personal picks and the duelling sweetness and salinity of an excellent Old Fashioned, courtesy of rye and a lively cheddar bitters. Only the Black Manhattan we found a little lacking, with the unusual notes of a peated Irish whiskey more bigged up than balanced out by toasted rice syrup.

Why should I go?

In a delicious custard-washed take on the Sazerac, by many accounts the original cocktail, we saw the essence of The Sackville Lounge’s potential – an audaciously elemental return to roots that doesn’t so much rip up the recipe as bring in a new lease of life to let us see things anew. The destination vibes Bar 1661 brought to an ignored corner of D7 are in dire need in this part of town, and it’s nice to see a business putting its money where, too often, moaning mouths abound. If you build it, they will come. If you quit complaining and invest in the city instead of doing it down, they might even keep coming back.