Gins I Love: the Connaught Bar
24-carat boozing 🍸🍸🍸🍸
There are plenty of places in London I have never been (I’ve only lived here for eleven years): Little Venice, never been there; “Bermondsey”; the Tower of London. And another jewel trove I’d never seen from the inside: the Connaught Hotel.
It is really very beautiful. Almost too perfect. Like a film set, I imagine. Or the Nineteenth Century. People are impossibly well-dressed. The staff are impossibly accommodating. They all have fun waistcoats. And like the Nineteenth Century, the whole thing seems to run on booze. Excellent booze.
I turned up at the Connaught Bar without having booked and was told I’d have to stand at the bar. Fine, no chore at all: all the better to admire the cubist fittings and the fancy lighting. And all the better to chat to the bar staff. At any posh London hotel with a famous martini bar, the law appears to provide that the staff must be handsome Italian men with very stylish, thick black glasses: no infringements at the Connaught.
While waiting for the drink to come about, I was handed a little strawberry concoction for my trouble, and enough olives to keep Filippo Berio out of mischief. Together they make a pretty festive still life, non’è?
Within about thirty seconds of martinising upright, I was given a seat in the ugly corner and continued on my boozing and musing. Here’s the product:
Taste: excellent. Botanist Gin - very perky - with the nec plus ultra Noilly Prat. There was enough lemon here to cure all the fleet of scurvy. 4Gs 🍸🍸🍸🍸.
Temperature: perfectly competent. 3Gs 🍸🍸🍸.
Mystique: excellent: this bar is a lovely place and they take the job seriously. I suppose I was a little put off by the trolley service going on at the table a few doors down. There was a lengthy spiel, accompanied by my Italian barman – how could he do this to me – pouring the chap’s martini from about 7ft in the air to create a spectacle that must have embarrassed the gin, the vermouth and the drinker (leave the trolley to Duke’s, I say). Still, I was happy where I was: it may not be London’s martini crown jewel but it’s certainly a treasure worthy of coveting. 4Gs 🍸🍸🍸🍸🍸.