Today I’m talking to Ryan Chetiyawardana. You may have heard of him. The London-based bartender and creative is behind the Mr Lyan group of venues, which began in 2013 with White Lyan in Hoxton — he closed that in 2017 to launch two venues in its place: Cub, and Super Lyan. In 2014 he launched Dandelyan in London — before killing that venue in 2019 to relaunch as Lyaness, one of my favourite bars in the world. He moved Super Lyan to Amsterdam in 2019, and launched Silver Lyan in the US in Washington DC in 2020 just before the pandemic arrived.

He’s known for his creativity and an approach to bars and drinks that asks, why do we do it this way? And many of the trends we see around the world in bars today have taken at least some inspiration from his experiments with White Lyan and Dandelyan some years ago.