Bar Review: Door No. 4, Grand Cayman
Grand Cayman's newest independent cocktail bar channels the spirit of Cayman, and executes its drinks in style.
The ‘Destination Drinking’ section includes city guides, place-oriented stories, personal travel essays exploring a range of topics, reviews, and general travel lifestyle tips for the tipsy traveler.
This review wraps-up this month’s content focused on the Caribbean. Next up: a holiday gift guide, and my best of 2022 lists.
I’ll admit that I’m not an easy person to thoroughly impress when it comes to food and drink. In the Brennan-Zielinski household, my mid-dinner high-five is the equivalent of Paul Hollywood’s signature handshake from Bake-Off. It’s a rarity; but when it happens, Ailis knows that she’s properly smashed it with a restaurant-worthy meal.
Now this is not to say that I’m unkind or pretentious whenever I eat and drink. (I’m not one of those miserable restaurant critics.) On the contrary, I’m always grateful to experience someone else’s cooking or bartending skills, regardless of where the final product falls on the spectrum of deliciousness and refinement. The privilege of going out to bars and restaurants is not lost on me. But sometimes people really get things right, and when they do, I believe they deserve genuine praise for their excellence. In Door No. 4’s case, the bar gets my “high-five.”
It’s a new concept — as in, less-than-a-year-old-new. The L-shaped wooden bar top to the right still has its sheen, the chic green velvet bar seats are still being broken in, and the coats of paint on the wall look so fresh they could’ve been painted the day before. Yet, all it takes is the sip of one cocktail to realize that it isn’t this bar team’s first rodeo.
As Ailis and I cozy up at a table towards the back of the bar, we have the privilege of being served by experienced lead bartender Alan Cartolano. Cartolano moved from London to work on this project with a veteran of Cayman’s cocktail scene, Simon Crompton, founder of Door No. 4, and is fastidious in his trade to say the least. We have a brief look at the menu, which is appropriately divided into four sections: house cocktails, restored classics, highballs + coolers and no + low, before swiftly ordering our first round. We both go for highballs — one from the daily menu, and a special whisky highball which features on their Wednesday hibachi and highballs menu.
Cartolano hops behind the stick, deftly builds our drinks, and quickly returns with the opening round. First impressions matter, and these cocktails look the part. They arrive in Nude Big Top highball glasses (a personal favorite collection of mine that I also proudly stock at home) with large chunks of crystal clear, hand-cut ice providing steady dilution and chill, and subtle yet impactful garnishes that catch the eye.
My nose is a little bunged up, and thus my ability to taste isn’t the sharpest, but I am immediately struck by the balance and purity of flavor in the Kudo Cooler from what I can perceive. I look to Ailis for affirmation given my current state, and it’s instantaneously given after her first sip. A good sign indeed. Tanqueray gin is with paired with cucumber saké, mango leaf cordial, lime, soda and mango skin essence. The tropical flavors marry beautifully with the gin’s botanicals, the cucumber saké adds a freshness and depth, and the carbonation lifts all of the subtle flavors right out of the glass. Is this available as an IV drip? I’ll take one of those, please.
Cartolano passionately explains how he sourced in-season local mangoes to create the cordial and essence — both of which are so vibrantly flavored that my internal dialogue is dominated by the thought that having mango in a cocktail will never be the same again. Fruit in the Caribbean tends to do that more often than not. Freshness, locality, and reimagining classic Caribbean cocktails are at the heart of everything Door No. 4 does, and the Kudo Cooler embodies this concept to a t.
Between rounds, Ailis and I smash through some grub, which is also on point, before transitioning to a couple bar seats. We make our way through the menu, and there’s not one drink that feels lackluster by any means. There’s a distinct style, a lightness and brightness to most of the cocktails, even the modern take on the Mudslide—a drink that originated in Grand Cayman—didn’t feel as weighty as it could’ve been.
The Painkiller Punch, a clarified milk punch made with coconut cake and pineapple-infused rum, orange tea and nutmeg mist is divine — guaranteed to appeal to any one who lays their lips on a glass filled with the liquid gold. The Full Circle Martini that’s served with a side of pickles, including pickled conch, a local delicacy, is exactly as a martini should be: chilled, stiff and balanced with the ideal amount of dilution so as to not wobble out of the place. There’s no time for rocket fuel in the Caribbean heat.
As we sit at the bar, passing around the array of cocktails that lie on the slick wooden bar top in front of me, I can’t help but feel slightly dispirited knowing that Door No. 4 isn’t a bar that I can revisit on a whim. In my line of work, I rarely visit a bar more than once after tasting the menu in order to experience as many places as possible, but Door No. 4 would get a revisit; which makes sense given my initial “high-five”.
On an island where most of the high-end cocktailing is found at the sophisticated hotel bars dotted along Seven Mile Beach, Door No. 4, which is located just off the main strip, is a breath of fresh air. It’s a bar, along with the award-nominated Next Door, that has set a new standard for cocktails not only in Grand Cayman, but in the Caribbean as a whole — and I say this without my paradise-tinted glasses on.
Considering Door No. 4 hasn’t even been operating for a year, the bar has a lot of be proud of. But, as is the case with most things in life, consistency and upward growth is paramount, so I guess I’ll have to plan another visit in the not too distant future. It’s hard work, but someone has to do it.
It’s great to see the guys get the cudos. Nobody will truly know the lengths they went to get open. The talent is second to none. I can’t wait to get back there and have the fortunate pleasure of being a regular!