“How does someone like you,” said my best friend, looking about in bewilderment, “know a place like this?”
Could I have waspishly taken offence (“I write a sodding drinks column, idiot”)? Sure, but I saw what she meant. The whole thing is improbable. You don’t expect to find a proper boozers’ den underneath Ziggy Green, an elegant Australian restaurant best known for brunch.
And where that upstairs offers the gentle murmur of people taking pretty pictures of clean-looking food, downstairs, in the Colony, there is a swear-filled cacophony, a symphony of glugged wine and fractured ice in vodka. Photos? Forget it. “Oi! No phones,” bellows Tim the barman. “Can’t you people just talk?”
This is not the first Colony. The present incarnation is a facsimile of the original club, which sat on Dean Street from 1948 to 2008 and was infamous for fearsome bingeing sessions that drew the likes of Peter O’Toole, Damien Hirst and Kate Moss (a friend now lives at its old address; hard to say if more or less drinking goes on there today).
What’s here now is what was there then, down to the posters and newspaper clippings and the piano that wine-sodden sorts lean on when it’s not being played.Prices remain as they did at last orders 16 years ago; singles are £4, doubles £6 and a surprisingly good bottle of wine comes in at £30 (glasses are £6).
“I think some people started coming ’cause they heard it’s cheap,” says Tim. “But you don’t come back if you don’t get it.”
Likely true — though Christ, a large Courvoisier for six quid is hard to resist. That’s what tempted me back five months after I’d first been down. That first time, I left after one drink, brooding about the place being little more than a theatre set. “It’s not really how I remember it,” said a pal. “Not that I can really remember it.”
Really, I think of this as a pre-school Gerry’s
Things are different now. There is not the time to get leathered, with closing at 11pm (really, I think of this as a pre-school Gerry’s), though happily many were putting a shift in with the wine, others on espresso martinis. Some were dancing, others making out, a few just sitting dazed on the floor. Save for one or two Soho sorts, maybe members from the old days, it felt like a room full of offbeat art-school kids.
“Everyone’s a bit too cool and young for us, aren’t they?” I said to my friend, before she piggybacked me down Regent Street. “That’s what I meant,” she said. “How does someone like you know a place like this?”
