In the 5-star luxury hotel Il Sereno, designed by the architect Patricia Urquiola, can be found a landmark of national mixing. The sign reads Lobby Bar and the bar manager is Don Vidura Nilaksha Colambage. Born in Sri Lanka in 1990, Vidura arrived at Sereno in 2019 after ten years of training and dedicated study of mixing. His cocktails seek to marry the flavours and aromas of his native Asia with those of his adopted homeland of Lake Como.
This season's menu's theme is the haiku, the poetic compositions originating from 17th century Japan. Each of the haikus is twinned with a cocktail, filling it with meaning, with the haiku wriIen in Vidura's own handwriting. Alcoholic cocktails take up 60% of the paper and are made using exotic fruit and all kinds of spirits. Soft drinks, or mocktails, make up the remaining 40% of the menu and are characterized by the use of aromatic herbs, flowers and de-alcoholic spirits, non-alcoholic bitters or fruit-based preparations. An explosion of nature, which is a reference to the vertical garden designed by the most creative of botanists, Patrick Blanc, which animates the architecture of the Hotel Il Sereno.
The cocktails can be combined with the dishes of the Al Lago restaurant created by chef Raffaele Lenzi, and the mocktails are specifically designed to accompany the Vegetables, Tubers and Roots menu. The primary aspect on which Vidura has been focusing from a while is the reduction of waste, thanks to the creative reuse of commonly discarded ingredients or parts of them. Architecture, gardens and gastronomy find their exact meeting point in the Lobby Bar, where Vidura's creations give an international, vegetal and territorial flavor to the cocktail proposal of Il Sereno Hotel.