The London Gin Club

Tuesday drags its feet through the daylight hours, but as the sun retreats beyond the horizon and the darkness descends there is a warming light amidst the Soho air. No it’s not Christmas baby’s Bethlehem star or Elton John declaring a sex shop open, but rather The Star at Night aka: The London Gin Club. From the outside it resembles little more than a dilapidated tumble of bricks with a sandwich board stationed outside as directions to the place are quite convoluted for anyone reliant on the internet to guide them through the squalid metropolis of London. Far from proclaiming the end is nigh, said board points you inside in the direction of gin with the opposite direction apparently leading to no gin. The choice is simple, sanity over unfathomable madness, bacon over salad, left over right and gin over all; so we staggered on in.

The first thing that hits you is how bloody big the place is. I felt I’d wandered into Winston Churchill’s TARDIS. There’s a very reputable sense about the place, like an upstanding speakeasy but without the pretentious meat-clods in flat caps and shirt sleeves screaming “Blimey guv’nor!” into a Blackberry for kicks. Around the walls are a cluttered but charming collection of olde timey street signs, cigarette adverts and subtly edited public information posters from a time when even your granddad’s gearstick was little more than a hairless cocktail-sausage urine delivery mechanism. We were asked if we’d booked a table, apparently that is something that people do. I did not, having stumbled upon the place more or less by chance, but they found us a seat all the same.

We were led downstairs into what looked like a WW2 bunker that someone had tried to spruce up in a bid to prevent the Blitz-induced blues from driving all the inhabitants to cannibalism. There’s something distinctly comforting about getting drunk underground. It’s as though you’re safe to get as fall down drunk as you please and all the careless traffic of the bustling world above is suspended high out of reach. It also gets really warm, but this could be an overly subjective observation given that my insides have been staging a coup d’état for years now. The waitress brought us a menu and for a moment I thought we were having dinner all over again, but alas this was a sterling catalogue of delights derived from juniper berries.

It’s worth mentioning now that there were too many varieties for my budget to accommodate, but I have absolutely no doubt that every single beverage in those pages would have been a delectable concoction based on what passed my lips that night. Insert shit dick joke here if you so desire, Haw-haw-haw. Witty little reader aren’t you. Anyway, infantile gibbering aside – the menu is exhaustive. The waitresses understand your confusion, they see how green you look as you turn through the pages wondering which any of these combinations of words could mean and they potter about dropping by to see if you’ve had enough time to digest all that potential goodness that rests between the covers of the menu. Real good sports about it they are, given that neither me nor the Australian comrade I’d recruited to assist me in this exploration are anything approaching an authority on gin.

Soon enough we’d decided our fates and my Old Bathtub Tom arrived with his old accomplice Fever Tree in tow. “What’s that? A mixer?” I hear you cry, be still dear reader don’t worry I still take my whiskey straight from the bottle, but these gins come in close to £10 a go and I’m told the tonic water really compliments it. Personally I’m still suspicious, but either way it makes a double-digit valued drink last just a little longer and that is probably no bad thing given just how freaking good it tastes. It was like having a clear spring morning poured coolly down my throat. It was ice water in hell. It was every slow pedestrian in London being sideswiped by a juggernaut. In short, it was beautiful.

My drinking partner from down under was enjoying a sweet Berkeley Square garnished with orange and lemon which I was fortuitous enough to cop a sip of. It’s the sort of thing you’d hope for instead of a fruit basket whilst convalescing, but no doctor this side of sanity would prescribe such a treatment. More’s the pity as this beauty stamps a smile on your face irrespective of how many limbs you’ve lost – although this may be pure conjecture given my lack of amputations.

Anyway both time and space is running out, so consider this review finished, but I really could not recommend this place enough – the atmosphere is relaxed, not so sophisticated that you get dirty looks for screaming into the night, but not basic enough to serve your drink in a plastic cup. The music, the people and the location make it prime for a nightcap haunt and they do food apparently, if that’s your sort of thing. It is mighty pricey for those who don’t have high walls to keep the poor and the lepers out, but certainly worthwhile as an experience for anyone who doesn’t want to suffer Soho sober.

#Edits #TheLondonGinClub