5L Speakeasy

Bar Menu

Everything starts in the beginning of the year, everything starts with a rooster’s crow. It’s a journey full of speakeasy stories, fine alcohol and pencils. 5L Speakeasy bar, which is based in Sofia, Bulgaria invited me back in 2019 to draw their new cocktail menu. It has 12 fully illustrated spreads and every spread tells the story of its cocktail

5L Speakeasy Bar is located behind a hidden door, where you have to test out a bunch of keys to find the right one. The name comes from the Bulgarian word “petel” which means rooster in English. Fiting for a cocktail bar.

All main characters

Here you can see all of the 12 highlighted cocktail names in the menu. I wanted to show you every character from the cocktail it represents. If you scroll down, you can see some of the spreads and read their stories. They are written in two languages ‒ Bulgarian and English.

Sketches of the spreads

Down below you can see some of the idea sketches and the inked illustrations before colouring.

The spreads

Every cocktail tells it's own story. I uploaded some of the spreads. "Hori Smoku" it's my favourite, probably because I'm super fascinated by the tattoo culture in history.