Gins I Love: the cocktail bar at Rules 🍸🍸🍸🍸

Patriotic boozing for the discerning bounder

I often think that I have missed my calling as a louche monarch: I’m great at feasting, low-stakes diplomacy and dressing up. I’d avoid any military stuff apart from the dress uniform and maybe the moustaches, but otherwise really give my all to the part.

These thoughts lead me to the inevitable and pressing question about where I would secretly take my mistress to drink (or even mistresses? Why not: I’m a louche monarch). Accordingly, I visited the bar upstairs at Rules last night, with its palm-fronded parlour – if you want a drink, better bring your machete – crackling fire, and a secret staircase built so Edward VII could engage in discreet assignations with actress Lillie Langtry.

It's really everything you could ask for in a clandestine bolthole with seating for a hundred in the centre of London. The décor is beautiful – it really is – and the awed tones of the travelling Americans around and about remind you that you really are in the old world. But what of that emblem of new world drinking we love so much…

Here’s the product:

Taste: excellent. The classic Tanqueray 10 with Dolin. Sets off the citrus of the gin very nicely. 4Gs 🍸🍸🍸🍸.

Temperature: excellent. A nicely steamed-up glass, right by the crackling coals. 5Gs 🍸🍸🍸🍸🍸.

Mystique: exceptional. The venue is just too perfect: the pretty floor, the foliage, handsome waiters in black tie who bring the drink over in its own little icy flask on a silver tray. With one hand they pour before, in a practised motion, spritzing a rindsworth of lemon oil over the top with the other. 5Gs 🍸🍸🍸🍸🍸.