Mojo
The illuminated Mojo Cocktail Bar sign in pale blue, raised on two posts above a roofline beside a floodlit plane tree, against the black of a Himarë night

Spile · Himarë · Albania

The lit sign on the promenade

Mojo Cocktail Bar stands on Rruga 2 Dhjetori, the strip that runs along the water at Spile and that carries no cars past its door. Its tables spill out under a pergola and a plane tree lit from below, and the bar keeps a lit sign raised on two posts above the roofline. Its own Instagram calls the place morning coffee to late-night cocktails.

What they pourFinding it

The light

Five lamps, measured off its own photographs

Sun on the bay, the glass on the table, the plane tree from underneath, the shelf behind the counter, and the sign. Laid out by hue rather than by hour — the hour is the one thing about this place that could not be pinned down twice.

  • the bay, an hour before dark

    #c7af80 · 41°

  • the glass on the table

    #9d760e · 44°

  • the plane tree, lit from below

    #a6a03d · 56°

  • the back bar

    #466ce0 · 226°

  • the sign

    #21d3ec · 187°

Each swatch is the mean of every pixel above a luminance floor inside one region of one of these photographs, and the degree figure is that set’s circular mean hue. Taken over 6,673 to 95,282 pixels. No colour temperature is quoted: these are saturated lamps and a fluorescent sign, far enough off the Planckian locus that the usual approximation returns its own constant rather than a reading.

The terrace

Tables on the seafront, an hour before dark

The strip in front of the bar is closed to cars, so the seating runs straight out across it towards the water, with the far arm of the bay closing the view to the south-east. Spile Beach begins about fifteen metres from the door.

Look across
A foam-topped coupe of deep amber cocktail and a black tumbler of crushed ice on a promenade table, with Himarë bay and a wooded headland behind them in low sun

The bar

Three it puts its own name to

  • Mojo Special

  • Pine Up

  • Twilight

Alongside them thirteen more with alcohol — a Negroni, an Old Fashioned, a Mojito, a Pornstar Martini among them — and four without. The rest of what it names.

The bar's pergola at night — a whitewashed plane trunk, a steel frame and a shelf of bottles lit blue behind the counter

Where

At the west end of the Spile promenade

Spile is the quarter of Himarë that faces the water. The pedestrianised promenade begins about thirty metres west of the bar and runs some 280 metres south-east from there, and nine other named businesses stand within fifty metres of the door — two more bars, three restaurants, a souvlaki counter, a guest house, a phone shop and a hairdresser. Himarë after dark sets out what else is open on it, and the nightlife guide goes further along the coast.

How to find it
DirectionsCall the bar