Case study
Hospitality timed to a running order.
Barclays Eagle Labs brought founders, investors and stakeholders together at Dish MCR. The bar had to be quick before the talks, quicker after them, and invisible during.
Dish MCR, Manchester
200 guests
Barclays Eagle Labs. Visual cocktails and fusion Indian bowl food at Dish MCR, designed around the two service spikes a keynote creates.
The project
The essentials.
The brief
The bar is where the networking happens.
Barclays Eagle Labs supports UK startups and scaleups, and the guest list for the evening was exactly that: founders, investors and corporate stakeholders, in a room where the point was for them to talk to each other.
Standard wine and beer from a trestle table no longer reads as hospitality to that audience. The brief asked for a bar that looked like it belonged to the brand, visual cocktails, fusion Indian bowl food served roaming, and service that was rapid but still refined, for a room of 200.
The bar was not there to be the event. It was there to give people a reason to stand near each other.
The constraint
A keynote splits the evening in two.
An evening built around talks does not have a steady service curve. It has two spikes with a dead flat hour in between, and both spikes are short.
Before the keynote, everyone arrives inside about twenty minutes and wants a drink before they sit down. During it, the bar has to be silent. After it, the room turns back into a networking floor and the queue rebuilds immediately.
Dish MCR added the second constraint. It is a premium event space in Manchester city centre, which means a tight load in window, no room for a large footprint and no tolerance for a build that overruns into the guest arrival.
What we designed
A bar scaled to the floor plan.
Our bars travel in sections, so we set the footprint to the room rather than the other way round. At Dish MCR that meant a build that read cleanly against a modern industrial space and left the guest flow open, so no bottleneck formed in the twenty minutes before the talks.
The menu was bespoke to the brand and deliberately short. Short menus are faster menus, and speed was the whole design problem. We staffed it with mixologists who are used to producing complex serves rapidly, because at this kind of event a guest spending the interval in a queue is a guest not doing the thing they came for.
Fusion Indian bowl food ran alongside, served roaming. Bowl food keeps people moving rather than anchoring them to a table, which matters when the whole point of the evening is that 200 people mix.
The evening.
Delivered
What we delivered.
A bar sized to the room. A modular build scaled to the Dish MCR floor plan, set to keep guest flow open through the arrival and interval spikes.
Service built for two spikes. A short bespoke menu and experienced mixologists, designed so the queue clears before the keynote starts and again after it ends.
Drinks and food together. Visual cocktails with fusion Indian bowl food alongside, served roaming and run by one team, so nothing falls between two suppliers.
In short
What did Drink Differently deliver for Barclays Eagle Labs?
We delivered the bar and catering for a Barclays Eagle Labs evening at Dish MCR, a premium event space in Manchester city centre, for 200 guests. Barclays Eagle Labs supports UK startups and scaleups, and the room held founders, investors and corporate stakeholders who were there to network. The brief asked for visual cocktails, a bar that looked like it belonged to the brand, fusion Indian bowl food served roaming, and service that was rapid but still refined. The evening was built around keynote talks, which creates two short service spikes with a silent hour between them, so the menu was kept deliberately short and staffed with mixologists experienced at producing complex serves quickly. Our bars travel in sections, so the footprint was scaled to the Dish MCR floor plan to keep guest flow open and prevent a bottleneck before the talks. The city centre location meant a tight load in window that could not overrun into guest arrival.
By Mr Flavour. Drink Differently is the creative drinks agency of Mr Flavour, rated 5.0 from 86 Google reviews. The work was first published on the Mr Flavour site: Read the Mr Flavour case study.
More work.
Briefs delivered by Drink Differently and the Mr Flavour team.
Keep exploring.
Start a brief.
Tell us the brand, the audience, the venue and the date. A tailored proposal follows within one working day.