I’ve always marvelled at those old photographs of air travel, where passengers are not cramped and delayed but free and easy on cream cushioned seats. There is a beautiful host in a fancy hat beside them serving cuts of lean pork from a trolley and topping up flutes of Champagne. It might be the Sixties: bouffant hair flirts dangerously with the top of the fuselage.
To drink at Brooklands, a restaurant and bar at the top floor of the Peninsula hotel off Hyde Park, is to reimagine a time bygone, when British aviation still revelled in the glamour of using cutlery 35,000ft above Lyon. French chef Claude Bosi is in charge. His dining room next door resembles something like an old first-class airport waiting room: chromatic; blue carpeted; sweeping windows through which to gaze at wheels skimming tarmac (though of course in this case, the London skyline).
The bar is far glitzier. Through a Star Wars-like corridor, accents of spaceship find lacquer and near-infinite lighting. It is not a million miles away from Austin Powers, albeit in muted tones. Views offer the London Eye and Wellington Arch. I begin, as ever, with a Hemingway Daiquiri. The best in London? No. That is served at Scarfes bar at the Rosewood if the Italian barman with the curly moustache is on shift.
Second best? Pound-for-pound, that might now be found at Bottle & Rye in Brixton (only a tenner). But it is excellent here all the same, refreshing and woozily hot-headed. I feel a pair of velvet flares coming on. A homage to air travel — and motorsport — the menu is engineered thus: between Mach I, Mach II and Mach III. It is a clear way to divide drinks from impotent, to driven, to Jeremy Clarkson muttering nonsensically in the back of a van. From Mach III, a cocktail called Morello, inspired by a Gimlet but a little softer. One for those who enjoy cherry, as I do. And another, named Disco, almost half Negroni, half Pisco Sour. I wonder if it might be bamboozling. It sounds rambunctious and it is.
Brooklands, then. Who is it for? People in expensive suits. People on transitory dates. People who enjoy fast cars and even faster planes. It is not full to the brim with soul but transparent in its lustre, a cocktail bar to admire one fandangle and then the next, before slinking off into the night full of liquor. Ah, the final drink from the Mach III section: the Hudson (mostly rye and Cognac). Have one of those and you are Icarus, flying towards the sun.
