The Bar Lab

We have collected recent menus from 100 of the world's best bars, according to the most recent rankings from The World's 50 Best. This list provides a great collection of innovative bars, however it doesn't provide extensive coverage across every region of the world. Flavonomics plans to collect a more extensive list of bars so we can provide more robust insights about the geographic trends in the use of flavour. We are also building a database that goes further back in time to capture trends over time.

Flavour harmony scores each combination of flavour notes by how much more often those notes appear together in cocktails than chance would predict, adjusting for how common each note is on its own. For example, how much more likely are we to see a third note among cocktails that already contain the first two? Ingredient synergy then measures how many highly harmonious combinations the ingredients form, with one note from each ingredient. The more strong harmonies they share, the greater their synergy. Because harmony is learned from cocktail bar menus, the same ingredients can score differently here than in the Pairing Engine or the Restaurant Lab. These scores are not a definitive answer on whether a combination works, but an observation based on the data we see.

We model the flavour of each ingredient by analysing thousands of sources, including recipe books, tasting notes, restaurant menus, and food & drink reporting. We find patterns in how they describe flavour and map those descriptions against 150 distinct flavour notes, from smoky to floral to citric, building up a detailed picture of how an ingredient actually tastes based on the collective experience of thousands of cooks and writers. The profiles are then refined by our Flavour Society members, who can adjust anything that doesn't ring true to their own palate. Further details about our modelling method can be found at Flavonomics | Methods.