join us for sips 'til siete every day from 5-7pm, with weekly changing cocktails, all for just £7.
book your table
we get asked about the name most nights, usually somewhere around the second margarita. people arrive at it from different angles. some think it’s a lucky number thing. a few have guessed at seven agave varietals, which is a good guess and completely wrong.
here’s crispin, our founder, on where it actually comes from
the name is loosely associated with the address of our club in 1990’s CDMX, El Colmillo, although being honest, we just like the number seven.
so: half heritage, half instinct. that feels about right for us.
before there was el pastor, and long before there was a pink door on brewer street, there was a nightclub in mexico city called el colmillo. crispin spent the nineties running it. that decade is the reason everything since exists. the mezcal, the late nights, all of it traces back to a room in CDMX and the people who filled it.
el siete is the closest we’ve come to putting that room in london. it’s down a flight of stairs, low-lit, pink-walled, open until 1am seven nights a week. the design nods to mexico city’s modernist architecture and the work of luis barragán, which is where the pink comes from. the rest of it comes from memory.
naming the bar after the club’s address was the sentimental option. we took it. but crispin is right that we also just liked the number and have kept it as a framing for our menu.
the cocktail menu, built with giles looker and michael butt of soulshakers, is structured entirely in sevens. seven margaritas, from the faithful to the experimental. seven agave signatures. seven classics reworked through our own sense of fun. that’s it.
it sounds like a gimmick until you try to write it. seven margaritas is not many margaritas. every one of them has to earn the slot, which means nothing generic survived. we end up with the 777, poured ice cold from a steel flask into a salted glass, sitting alongside the cantalupo, which arrives inside an actual cantaloupe.
the same logic runs through sips ’til siete, our aperitivo hour: five until seven, every day, a margarita, a frozen and a wildcard serve, all at £7. new drinks every week.
behind the bar we keep around sixty agave spirits, which is the one place we’ve let the counting go. tequila and mezcal, plus the categories that rarely make it this far north: raicilla, capón, pechuga. we could probably build a case for why sixty is really just seven wearing a disguise.
come find us
El Siete 66-70 brewer street, soho, london W1F 9UP
open 5pm-1am, monday to sunday
