Life isn’t all beer and skittles, sure. But sometimes it is Champagne and polo (I don’t play, though the Argentine captain once gave me a lesson that ended swiftly when I almost knocked out my horse with the mallet. “We don’t do that,” he said, sniffily lighting a cigarette).
Last week is perhaps illustrative. Look, between us, it’s been known to happen, but most afternoons I’m not found alone and bewildered in a five-star hotel’s bar. That was the game on Thursday; the Corinthia had beckoned me into Velvet, so named as it is a room decorated in the style of ballgowns draped over baby grands. The bar top is piano black, the walls a jewelled red. And while I was at that bar, with nobody but the barman around, a drink appeared that looked like a basketball.
Incongruous is the word. There is a certain madness to this bar’s new menu — the playful kind, not the axe-murderer kind. There was certainly a look of playfulness in the eyes of barman Luca Cicalese as the fifteenth drink (fine, the sixth) was laid down under the glimmering light. “I see,” he said, grinning, “you are a professional.”
This is a menu of ideas; they call it The Quote Book. The premise is straightforward, albeit ingenious, and unexpectedly executed. The book runs through famous faces of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries — though one of them is fictional (Benjamin Button), and another has no soul (Chat GPT) — has a quote from each, and a drink that draws on both the person and their idea. Which came first, the person or the quotes? Turns out the quotes.
And so you’ll have lines like Coco Chanel’s ode to fizz: “I only drink Champagne on two occasions, when I’m in love and when I’m not.” Natural law dictates the drink must be a twist on a Champagne cocktail, and so it is, but what a twist. Champagne is there but so too is andaliman pepper-infused vodka, vanilla, white wine, and cadello liqueur. And then come the Chanel specific touches; there’s gin, but it’s 71 Gin — those with weak hearts should not look up the price — which looks like a bottle of the No. 5 scent. On the side is caviar — a nod to the famous bag (even I know that one) — except it’s not, really, it’s small black bubbles that burst with passion fruit.
I won’t run through it all — that might ruin the eye-widening surprises — but there’s genius with the Bored Child, a nod to Elon Musk (his inane quote — “Good ideas are always crazy until they’re not” — is in stiff competition with Oprah's for being the dullest). Musk can do one, as far as I’m concerned, but the drink is a star: on a carbon fibre car — unbranded, but you can guess — sit three Old Fashioned-esque plays, each made of Johnnie Walker Blue, averna amaro, a touch of maple, a finish of corn liqueur. But all are a different colour: the first, completely clear, the second teak, the third a walnut burr. As with the colour, the flavours change — taste differing subtly at first, then markedly. It is fun to dance with different brothers.
That basketball? For Michael Jordan. It has ketchup in — drinking it was only my second experience of the stuff (I have had an unusual life) — but also whisky, Aperol, yellow chartreuse, maple, lemon. Ingredients list for a student fishbowl? Yes, and yet, extraordinarily, it is elegant, put together, a punch of whisky with a sweet note from the tomato. I would have bet against it. Michael Jordan would have bet against it — he’d have bet a night with your wife against it. But Jordan wouldn’t have won; he’d have been mad as hell as he sipped it back.
Ketchup is not the only oddity. The glassware, you’re gathering — basketballs, electric cars, balloons. There are abstract vessels from Murano, there are martini glasses not more than a palm high, there are Picasso faces in ceramics. One, made for Greta Thunberg, is spun wax. Drinks come with tartlets balanced on the top of the glass, or full with liquid luminescently green. Or perhaps fluorescently.
The menu, it’s said, comes from Salvatore Calabrese, Christian Maspes and his team, including Cicalese. Perhaps. But as I sat there on that stool, at that piano black bar, drinking through a Calabrese martini — “please, the basics, I beg you” — I did not think of them. I did not think even of Wonka. I thought of Alice and her Wonderland, and Wonderland's Hatter. Suddenly, the cars drove off, the green evaporated, the ball left the court. It was calm, and I was alone again, bewitched now, though still bewildered. Did I really drink any of that? A voice floated from the bottles: “You would have to be half-mad to dream me up.” Just when I needed it: the perfect quote.
