Nightmare on a night out: Woman claims on TikTok that she accidentally ordered a $2,400 cocktail
PRODUCTION - 01 July 2023, Berlin: In a bar, two visitors toast with a glass of non-alcoholic beer and a glass of Aperol Spritz. Photo: Christophe Gateau/dpa (Photo by Christophe Gateau/picture alliance via Getty Images)
A woman on TikTok is claiming she accidentally ordered a cocktail in London that cost £1,890 – or about $2,400 — though others have questions about exactly what may have happened.
Located in Belfast, Ireland, the woman, named Lynsey Bennett, made two viral TikTok videos in late 2023 describing her mixological mishap.
In the first video, posted on Nov. 7, she said that she "ordered a £2,000 cocktail, and couldn't afford to pay for it."
"So my husband and I were spending a few days in London just before [the] New Year," she revealed for context.
After a night out, and feeling "a little bit tipsy," she said she and her husband went to their hotel's bar.
There, she struck up a conversation with the bartender, whom she said had "just started" his job.
"I always drink champagne. I rarely drink cocktails," she said.
However, she said she was inspired to "order something a little bit different" — so she ordered a cocktail.
She said she thought the cocktail was called "1890," and she assumed that was the price of the cocktail as well — £18.90 (or about $24 in U.S. dollars).
The cocktail contained Cristal, an expensive brand of champagne, as well as "30-year-old cognac" and gold leaf, she said.
She also said she was given a "huge book to sign."
After she had her drink, "they presented the bill for £2,000, and I was like, ‘Uh oh, I can't afford to pay that,'" said the woman on TikTok.
In U.S. dollars, £2,000 is about $2,500.
In a follow-up TikTok video posted on Nov. 12, she said she misread the price on the menu, which she said was written as "one eight gap nine zero."
"So I presumed it was 18 pounds 90," she said — adding that other drinks were in that price range. "It was definitely my mistake, but it was a genuine mistake," she said.
The bartender "started to panic" and called over his manager, she said.
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"This was a five-star hotel, so the manager was so discreet and so wonderful," she said. "He completely played it down," she added — and told her to return to her room and enjoy the rest of her stay.
She did not name the hotel.
She spent the rest of her stay stressing about paying for the cocktail, she said, which she said she "didn't even enjoy," as it was "whiskey-based."
She does not like whiskey, she said.
Finally, on another evening, again feeling a bit "tipsy," she said, she went into the bar and ran into the same manager from the previous night.
The manager, she claimed, joked about how she was "the girl who made us open the Cristal," and then said that he had fired the bartender.
"I burst into tears. I was so terribly, terribly upset," she said.
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The manager then told her to relax, she said, as he had not actually fired the bartender — but said that the facility "had given him training because this has happened before."
She said, "After that, we actually sat with the manager and enjoyed drinks with him and his family."
"I will forever check the price of cocktails from now on," she added.
Her second video has been viewed more than 2.7 million times.
Fox News Digital reached out to her for comment.
While this story had a purported happy ending, many people said they wondered if it happened exactly as described.
The cocktail's base liquor changed from cognac (a type of brandy) in one video to whiskey in the next, some people noted; plus, the overall behavior of the bar manager seemed strange to a few people.
One person wrote on TikTok, "Surely they would confirm the price with you first?"
Another person questioned, "Why would anyone make a cocktail with Cristal in the first place?"
David Ellis, a food and drink critic for the U.K.'s Evening Standard, also was doubtful that the story happened as it was described.
He told Fox News Digital he was unsuccessful in reaching the TikToker.
In a four-minute TikTok video he himself released on Nov. 15, he highlighted some discrepancies he said he found in the story.
"I have had questions all day about ‘is this possibly true,’" he said.
And while he acknowledged that he could not definitely say whether the story happened or not, he said he found many details to be a bit odd.
The cocktail's pricey ingredients included Cristal, which he said "retails for 300 pounds" (about $381 U.S. dollars) and 30-year-old cognac, which can range anywhere from 180 pounds (about $228 U.S. dollars) to "in the thousands, quite easily."
"If you see that on a menu, you probably already know that this is not going to be a cheap drink," said Ellis.
Ellis also noted that "cognac is brandy," not whiskey — saying that "the story's already not really adding up."
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Additionally, Ellis was skeptical of the claim the manager simply gave the bartender training as a result of the incident, and that it has "happened before," in which someone accidentally ordered an extremely expensive cocktail.
"There's no way that's happened twice. It's just too much money for a hotel to lose," he said.
Ellis also was unsuccessful in his attempts to track down where this incident might have happened, he said.
The Savoy, a luxury hotel in London, has a restaurant called "1890," said Ellis — but the hotel said it did not sell a drink that was £1,890, he said, and indicated that it was not their establishment.
Further, Ellis said the fact that the drink menu's prices were not whole numbers struck him as unusual.
"No high-end hotel in London lists drinks that [aren't] a round number anymore," he said — noting that something priced at "99p" comes off as inelegant and cheap.
Ellis was unsuccessful in finding a cocktail in London priced at £1,890, he said, noting many locations had cocktails priced in that range — but none fit the exact description given by Bennett.
"I went through every five-star hotel," he said.
"I cannot say that … it didn't happen," he clarified.
"But what I can say is, she thought she was drinking whiskey when it was brandy, no one gets trained twice for a mistake like that, and nowhere in London can I find a drink like that," said Ellis of the Standard.