Birmingham’s cocktail scene has spent the last few years turning out bars that win national awards, and the city’s chefs have noticed. The latest arrival comes from one of them: Matt Wilden, owner and chef of the Kings Heath Mexican restaurant PERRO, who has opened Snake Oil, a small late-night bar, right next door at Kings Court.
The pitch is a chef opening the bar he wants to drink in rather than a slick concept, and the drinks back it up. The menu was built in collaboration with Katie Rouse of Couch in Stirchley, the bar named the number one cocktail bar in the UK on the 2026 Top 50 Cocktail Bars list. It runs to eight original cocktails alongside the classics, with serves like the Snake Oil Daiquiri, a Tonka Bean Boulevardier, a Freezer Martini and a Salty Scotch Old Fashioned. Modelo pours on tap, and there is a secret shot menu for the brave.
Snake Oil sits inside a wider move we keep seeing: the drink treated as the main event rather than an afterthought, whether that is a three-hour queue for tea at Heytea’s first UK lab or the home bar becoming a design decision in its own right, as with the new wave of at-home cocktail machines. Snake Oil is at the other end of that spectrum: small, chef-led, built around character over polish.
It is the kind of opening that rewards a city rather than a destination. A good neighbourhood bar next to a good neighbourhood restaurant, from people who already know the street, is a quietly confident move, and a vote of confidence in Kings Heath as somewhere worth staying out in.
Snake Oil is open at Kings Court, Kings Heath, Birmingham. Details and images via Snake Oil.