Half-dark and deco: the Beaumont’s bar
(Picture: Helen Cathcart)Some lessons really shouldn’t need teaching, but this weekend I learnt the hard way that plastering your face with temporary tattoos isn’t the shrewdest move when an afternoon under the blazing summer sun follows. My cheeks now sport the tan lines from hell, including one unsightly speckle that looks like an apple with a bite chewed out. Good old Glastonbury.
Mind you, fruit on the face has been big since René Magritte’s bowler-hatted, Granny Smith’d Son of Man, the surrealist’s 1964 self-portrait about looking beyond the obvious, or something. Magritte has inspired a new(ish) walnut-panelled American bar in the Beaumont, where a copy of Le Maitre d’école — an elder sibling to the Son — is framed by gold-brown bottles of booze, and lends its name to the first drink on the “ceci n’est pas” menu (cigars feature, but no pipes).
While the deco lounge, which really feels like it belongs on a yacht, is as old world as they come — brass-studded chairs, decanters everywhere, obligatory Rat Pack snaps — the cocktail list is surprisingly and admirably inventive for a place that could get away with nothing but mandatory Martinis for all. See the Meditation, where two types of Scotch are stirred up with port and Cynar, or the Memory of a Journey, which puts Amaro Montenegro with Campari, coffee liqueur and sweet vermouth. There are brains at work here; they too are looking beyond the obvious.
Their specialism, though, is a seductive kind of comfort. Snacks arrive unbidden, at the end Champagne is suggested “for the road”. The half-dark is good, too — just enough shadow to camouflage even the most idiotic of tans.
