*****

Review by Kelly Hussey

21/01/2011

The Venue

As with any cool cocktail bar worth its salt, London Cocktail Club is hard to find unless you know what you’re looking for. Tucked away along Goodge Street, the little fire-escape style metal stairway is barely discernible on a street filled with in your face restaurants. Walking down and past a big piece of funky graffiti art, the bar immediately makes an impact. Able to seat 70, it’s something of a Tardis, stretching back past a narrow walkway with a large bar complete with huge bar stools to the left and some peripheral sofas and tables to the right. The dim lighting is lifted by the bright backlit bar, showing off row upon row of neat bottles of exciting looking spirits. Vintage jewellery boxes, funky walls and a general feeling of decorative flair is evident throughout. At the back is a larger seating area with more tables for bigger groups. One of the cutest touches are the toilets – the only thing giving away which is the gents and ladies is a large door knob for the boys and two big knockers for the girls. Get it? You won’t after 8 cocktails so don’t go stumbling into the wrong one.

The Atmosphere

Secretive, cool cocktail bars are springing up all over London as the trend spreads from Paris and New York for ‘in the know’ drinking dens. London Cocktail Club is counteracting this with a real sense of fun. From the personable, incredibly friendly bar staff to the funky soundtrack booming in the background, this isn’t a bar that will turn you away for not being trendy enough.

The Drink

London Cocktail Club may be putting the fun back into London’s cocktail scene but they’re not skimping on quality. Doing for gastronomic cocktails what Heston has done with molecular gastronomy, the team here is really pushing the boat out. Priced at £7.50-£9 a cocktail, it’s also extremely competitive for the area

A simple strawberry daiquiri is kept simple, twisted by being served in a jar filled with ice – a real alcoholic Slush Puppy. A Brixton Riot is served, of course, with a fire show, adding a theatrical edge of the drink that will get the whole bar talking. An eggs and bacon-style martini comes with a slice of pancetta and egg as a main ingredient in the cocktail itself – it really does taste like breakfast. Follow it up with an apple crumble or rhubarb and custard and you can forego dinner altogether. A dangerous game, perhaps, but worth the headache in the morning.

If you want to do a shooter then an oyster bomb is an exciting twist on the Jaegar Bomb, served in real oyster shells with a hit of Tabasco sauce designed to be drunk in the same way you eat oysters – chuck it down your throat. Fun and innovative, it defines the way that this bar interacts with its customers. And, if you don’t love cocktails (say what?) then London Cocktail Club does an incredible house wine. Priced at just over £3 for a glass, both the house red and white are easy to drink and delicate on the palate, which goes to show the thought they’ve put into every aspect of the business. They finish up the selection with bottled Tiger, Kronenbourg, Magners and London Pride. And keep an eye out for their soon to launch tasting menu. To cost £40 a head, they will take you on a journey of cocktail gastronomy, introducing canapes and cocktails that will test your senses to their limit. Exciting things ahead, indeed.

The Last Word

You can’t fail to fall in love with London Cocktail Club and it’s refreshing to find a bar that produces quality but doesn’t take itself too seriously. Watch this space, this is one brand that will make headlines for all the right reasons.

Given its name and those above the door, you’d be forgiven for thinking it sounds a bit swanky, perhaps with a silent ‘s’, yet thankfully there’s not too much cocktail chin-stroking going down. With swallow-themed wallpaper, knobs on the gents’ door and knockers on the ladies’, it’s kind of kitsch and, accompanied by a soundtrack of guilty pleasures, kind of cheesy.

Small and a bit of a tight squeeze when busy with an up-for-it after-work crowd, the L-shaped bar area is overseen by a team of established and experienced bartenders whose drinks were made quickly and competently with no small amount of smiley showboating. The drinks list contains both contemporary and classic London cocktails alongside some gin drinks and a section dedicated to gastro-mixology – cocktails inspired by the kitchen.

We kept things classic with a decent martini and a so-so Tommy’s margarita. Compared to most party bars, the drinks are great, but it’s not The Savoy. The retro food menu is big on British and a touch tongue-in-cheek, with pick ‘n’ mix, penny chews and screwballs featuring beside sharing platters and pudding cocktails. A prairie oyster (raw egg, Tabasco and Worcestershire sauce) hit the spot, and the pork scratchings were fresh, but the bread and oil was stingy and tasted stale. Clearly, Monsieur Blanc wasn’t in the kitchen the evening we visited.

With a recent flurry of new (and fantastic) London cocktail bars (mainly in Shoreditch), I wondered what the new London Cocktail Club would offer. Anything different? One thing it had in its favour already was location – just off Charlotte Street in the West End where there are a plethora of great restaurant but cocktail bars aren’t as plentiful.

So before I descend the staircase with you into this new bar, let me give you a little background into its owners and their philosophies for the bar: The London Cocktail Clubis the brain child of two Jameses (who did indeed win Raymond Blanc’s TV Show, The Restaurant). This fact would be irrelevant, however Raymond is now a major shareholder in The London Cocktail Club too. We’ll get back to Raymond in a moment. Co-creator JJ, explained that the thought behind The London Cocktail Club was to create a “cocktail version of a great British Pub”. But what does this mean? He wants to keep the laid-back atmosphere, friendly ambience, pretence-less feeling and fun of a pub but with the touches of style of a cocktail bar as well as incredible drinks. Along with this they wanted to create a bar-snacks / nibbles menu that’s the perfect accompaniment to drinking with a classy twist (cue Mr Blanc).

As you descend the staircase, off Goodge Street, you walk into an intimate space (conical flask shaped) with room for siting at bar tables, at the bar or in the lounge area. The bar itself (drinks bar) is huge with a “cold kitchen” at one end so you can grab your food and drinks all in the same place and see it all being made in front of you while, you prop up the bar. Behind the bar sits some beautiful ornate wood carvings that surround the drinks – reminiscent of classy victorian drinking establishments. The walls are a genius feature, with traditional ties tightly hung (also matching the material on the bar stools) and stained chipboard, that looks like modern art. There is room to sit, stand, prop or lounge! And that is what they want you to do here – kick back and relax with some fantastic drinks. Yes you are entering a cocktail bar but minus the pretence.

Now to the menus – the cocktail menu is wonderful. It blends classics, with modern takes on classics and some genius food inspired cocktails. I had a Brixton Riot which was a blend of Cranberry, Lychee and Rum, served in a flaming glass and a spinning flaming passion fruit floating on top. To say it was delicious would be a horrific understatement. I could have had 5! The food cocktails range from bacon and egg martinis to squid ink sours and an Oyster Bomb – an oyster shell, floated with Jaegermeister and spiced red bull jelly! Simply incredible! JJ explains that they want to be “tongue in cheek and have fun with drinks; drinks have such a huge impact on even michelin stared cuisine so why not the other way round?”. Unlike many of their heavily priced neighbours, cocktails here are happily affordable starting at £7.50. JJ assures me that if you don’t want a cocktail they have some cracking bottles of Rosé too, if you want to let your hair down that way!!

The food menu is equally special. They have created, with a lot of input from Raymond Blanc, a delightfully quirky British Tapas Menu – including flavoured popcorn, meat lollipops, cup-a-homemade-soup and even Mr Whippy! All portions are for nibbling on and very reasonably priced (starting at just £1) and meant to compliment, not over-shadow your drinking experience and merriment.

The music is rock’n'roll, soul and funk (anything from Ella Fitzgerald to AC/DC) but to add to the inclusive nature of the bar, ask the barmen to put on a song and they will (unless it’s pop or funky house!!). Simple but very effective touches.The London Cocktail Club is perfect for mid-week after work / catch up drinks. It is a laid-back den, a fun den, a kick-back den, a genius drinks den, a delectable food den – leave your pretense and pre-conceived notions of a London cocktail bar at the door and head on in…who knows, you might even see Raymond munching on a Mr Whippy and slurping down an Oyster cocktail! One of the best cocktail bars in the West End? Definitely. One of the best cocktail bars in London? Yes.