Mohito

Doing dinner at the Lighthouse Hotel in Galle, one of the strangest experiences I've had. The hotel looks simply amazing, a fantastic retro feel with splashes of cubism mixed in with colonial style Sri Lanka - the Lighthouse's architect was celebrated Sri Lankan Geoffrey Bawa. The food, which we ate in an enormous wooden floored open room that looked like a colonial ballroom, surrounded by white linen curtained windows, was uniformly disgusting. If you could only imagine French food cooked by a Sri Lankan chef who had never been outside Galle, then you might start to appreciate the scale of the disaster. Why am I telling you all this? Because we had Mohitos in the bar before dinner and they were great.

Ingredients

For each Mohito

• 50ml lime juice
• 50 ml vodka
• Handful of crushed mint leaves
• 7-Up

Use a tall glass. Mix the lime and vodka, add the mint and loads of ice. Top up with 7-Up. If you want to be a purist, use soda and sugar syrup.