Cahoots, Soho

Duncan Stirling and Charlie Gilkes do love a theme bar. The pair owns Made In Chelsea magnets such as Bunga Bunga (bottom-pincher-plagued cheesy Neapolitan 1950s pizza parlour), Bart's (Val de Sloane Square après-ski chalet shindig) and Mr. Fogg's (Victorian voyager's Mayfair town 'hice' or tweedy 30s-throwback MP Jacob Rees-Mogg's gaff, I can never quite decide). Their latest wheeze replaces what was the no-less heavily staged DISCO (Cahoots' self-explanatory 70s-style predecessor, sadly, nowhere near as dangerously debauched as Studio 54, as this tearaway teen remembers it). So convincing is the mise-en-scène that is the venue's entrance - flagged up by a sign that says "To The Trains", accessed via a wooden escalator that leads to a ticket office manned by the first of various period-piece extras straight out of Foyle's War - foreign tourists are convinced Kingly Court Station is actually part of the London Underground network. If it were a station, it would be on the Party Line; for here's a morale-boosting knees-up in a full-blown recreation of a Tube station (complete with old Bakerloo line carriage) circa Biggin Hill and Bluebirds Over The White Cliffs Of Dover. Van-loads of vintage props set the scene and, when I drop in, some game birds have gaily entered into the spirit by dressing in 40s mufti, presumably in the hope of attracting a GI who will cover them with Hershey's kisses, shower them with cologne, Helena Rubenstein rouge and Nylons and whisk them away from bombed-out London to a lovely new life as a Housewife of New Jersey. My gimlet eyes, of course, see this barmy bunker for the charade it is. Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mr. Stirling? In wartime Blighty, you'd be lucky to find Camp coffee - as in sickly sweet ersatz alternative, not espresso served by some queer bugger debarred from service lest he become the barrack-room bike. Here, you're on for cracking classic and contemporary cocktails billed as 'starlets and sirens' and 'wide-boys and good-time girls, all served - neat touch! - with free rations of ham and pickle cut-up sarnies in army issue tins. What's more, the two brooding Continental chaps charged with martini-making would certainly not be employed behind Cahoots' bar, rather charged and slung behind a POW camp's bars; "Wops" - "Italians" to you - being shamefully allied to those spiffingly attired but thoroughly beastly Nazis back in 1941. Any internment in this camp caper is no hardship, what with decent drinks and jitterbugging to Glenn Miller's In The Mood with hunky Hank from Hoboken NJ to keep you amused. Welcome to The Blitz... if not quite as the late lamented Steve Strange imagined it! 
13 Kingly Court W1B 5PW www.facebook.com/cahootslondon

The Chelsea Pensioner, Chelsea

Technically speaking, I live in Chelsea. To all you incredulous East Londoners, here's 'WHY?!!!' 1. Hard to believe now, but once upon a time, King's Road was the Dalston de ses jours 2. Unlike Poplar or Peckham, an explicit condition of residency is that you take a minimum of two showers daily... using products not available in Poundland. 3. Surrounding myself with Made In Chelsea's (fragrant) heirheads and chinless chumps, as opposed to Homerton hipsters, allows me to perpetuate the self-delusion that I'm still 18 and edgy. Technically speaking, I am also now grown closer to getting my free bus pass than to passing out, pished, after free love upstairs on a night bus. Some aspects of my wasted youth, I REALLY do miss. So, just a short stagger away from my now ludicrously unattainable nano-pad, bought for buttons back in the day at a price that would not secure a Clapton closet in today's febrile hyper-inflated market ( #pension #poolinprovence #funded #smugbastard), The Chelsea Pensioner has my name on it. Once The Black Bull pub, like so many other locals, it too seemed destined to end up as a Metro/ Local/ Little Waitrose flogging truffle oil, beluga, Bollinger and all life's other necessities to the filthy rich foodies that have overrun my manor. Opened by the stylish cove who owns Simmons, King's Cross and Camden cocktail lounges, a neon sign in its window promises “cold beer and a warm heart” - the latter, a rare find in mercenary SW3/5/7/10 these days. If the Royal Hospital's red-coated old soldiers' mobility scooters manage to propel them to the Royal Borough’s western boundary,  they’ll find jokey, retro, pick’n’mix decor, Meantime and Camden on tap, Prosecco at £15, Rob Roy and daiquiri cocktails, flatbread pizzas, a pool table, a cute patio yard and, quite possibly, yours truly propping up the bar, reminiscing about Chelsea's golden age when home-grown punks and peacocks, not minted Muscovite trash and Euro hedge funders' frosty-faced salon-blonde bitches, paraded its main drag.

358 Fulham Road SW10 9UU http://www.thechelseapensioner.co.uk

De Beauvoir Tavern, Haggerston

The Fox and The Haggerston on the other side of Kingsland Road are jumping, but there are few takers for cocktails at DBT when I drag my weary derriere over Dalston way, bitching about how K and C might as well be Kansas now that all the action - ce soir nothwithstanding - is out East. Still, living cheek by Dead Sea mud-massaged jowl with Made In Chelsea's waxed back sack and crack bores (according to one on-the-make minx I know who goes there, perish the thought) has its compensations. Style-wise, I don't feel inadequate. Next to E8's hipster hordes, I look about as on-the-moollah as SW3's answer to Cristiano Ronaldo, over-moisturised nob knob, Ollie Locke the manchild who managed to be upstaged by magnolia emulsion on last season's celeb Big Bro'. De Beauvoir Tavern is the latest watering hole from the peeps behind Cargo and The Redchurch. A long corridor of train buffet carriage proportions, it's a bit of a squeeze by the bar; best to bag a booth to the rear.  The cocktail list is short - although not as short as the wine list if the scant contents of a fridge are it. Treacle and clover club appear alongside house ideas fisticuffs (a Jameson Irish whiskey, Laphroaig and Old Krupnik honey liqueur toddy), and nightcap (a JW Black and cherry brandy Manhattan). Grub boils down to fancy filled rolls -  chicken with hoisin and oyster sauce, vegetarian Wellington with goats cheese and shrooms, and dry-aged red poll beef - fair at a fiver a pop. The cod-Victorian decor is saying Sergeant Pepper's - and lonely heart I stay. There again it is barely the hour at which most locals crawl out of their scratchers on a Sunday. But with a 30-minute taxi ride now more expensive than a return flight to Rome, I'm on an economy drive. With the ordeal of the Overground/ Underground schlep West to face, 8pm is late enough to be out East on a school night.

321 Kingsland Road E8 4DL 7739 3440 http://tinyurl.com/kgr5ycb

London House, Battersea

I dug the dive bar at Ramsbo's Union Street Cafe. Will Gordon grab me again with his latest gaff, London House? Problemo: I'm not big on Battersea, on account of having been banished there - weeping, wailing, pilled-up to the pituitary gland on anti-depressants - when I couldn't afford the rent in Chelsea. That was back when the King's Road (hard as this is to believe to anyone under 30) was an eye-poppingly cool street style catwalk not yet overrun by Ollie, Golly, Binky, Stinky, Caggy, Slaggy and other scripted reality show Muppetry. Nowadays, once-grim Battersea is touted as South Chelsea, its cut glass accents as sharp as the blades toted by trouble on the notorious Winstanley Estate during my enforced exile. SW11's flush residents will be manna to Ramsay on a notoriously difficult site that has seen off others, most recently blink-and-you-missed-it Bennett's Oyster Bar and Brasserie. Problemo numero 2: I'm not big on drinking in rooms that look like the set for a remake of 80s OAP sitcom Waiting For God.The lounge - tasteful as it is in Prussian blue, cumin and ox-blood upholstery, warmed by a flame effect fire - is an ante room divorced from the out-of-shot bar's theatre. Make that a great-auntie room, given the age of some of the leather bags loitering after lunch when I drop in. Still, drinks such as Garden of Eden (Elmer T. Lee bourbon, apple and lavender shrub, Kummel and celery soda) and Flying Scotsman (Clynelish Distillers Edition malt, honey, bitters and lapsang souchon smoke) make the safari south worthwhile. Polished, enthusiastic service and realistic pricing - £8 for gin fizz - should also help assure its success. Me? I'm soon itching to get back to my reality, even if, priced out of prime Chelsea, the Spencer Matthew classes are encroaching on my manor now. Totes traj!

7 - 9  Battersea Square SW11 3RA 7592 8545 http://www.gordonramsay.com/london-house/

Ruski's Tavern, Kensington

The first time I visited Russia, it was still part of the dreaded Soviet Union. Head-to-toe in my Yohji/ Comme cod-Stalin comrade look that cost more than a red army of grain-harvesting Volgograd gummy grannies would earn in a lifetime, how I pitied the stern-faced matrons jostling 10-deep, hell-bent on securing the latest (only) thing to hit the shelves that week at Moscow's appalling State-owned department storeski GUM -  ludicrously expensive, revolting crude red lippy that any self-respecting 6-year-old London fashionista who found such a joke item attached, free, to a kiddies magazine at WH Smith would jettison pronto. The only other items for sale were gas stoves, toothpicks, rat-traps and nasty Nylon Romanian track suits in vilest vanilla and mauve hoops. Nowadays, it's Russian nouveaux riches' turn to pity Brit paupers, packing out Primark while they drop thousands on Vuitton, Versace, Gucci and Louboutin - yet somehow contrive to still look like Red Square hookers circa Letter To Brezhnev. Will homesick Russians dig Ruski's Tavern, new in Kensington opposite Embassy Row? Who knows? But for anyone who fancies a life of caviar and chips washed down with 6 litre bottles of Cristal that, at £25,950, cost more than a brand new BMW 120i ES Coupé (or a terraced house in Burnley - twinned with Chernobyl), this mock Cold War-era Muscovite bar/ club pastiche with its daft cosmonaut 'art' is the place to hang out. It's opposite, and run by two escapees from, that other themed posho playground, the hilariously tacky Bodo's Schloss; a Heidi Hi I secretly enjoyed (see http://tinyurl.com/mx64oa2 ) For the price of a Red Army, or Kremlin, cocktail (a tenner), perhaps you can reel in the sort of jammy basturt that can afford to keep you in the manner to which you want to become accustomed. Hedge fund Hugos; Made In Chelsea chumps; junior oligarchs; Monaco and Marbs-trash; football club owners et al.
1 Kensington High Street  W8 5NP 3747 6919 http://www.ruskis.com

Mr. Fogg's, Mayfair

Flustered by my temporary DISCO malaise (see previous review), I am escorted to the relative calm of a new bar to help me come down. On paper, ‘Phileas Fogg’s Mayfair mansion’ is theme bar hell, but the latest jape from Charlie Gilkes and Co is not as arch as it sounds. In a witty cod-Victorian drawing room stuffed with exotica from the fictional traveller’s foreign adventures, staff, lookers all - Old Etonian Gilkes's ex-fags? - appear in duds from Flashman's days. Dapper chaps who might otherwise have become estate agents in Fulham, mix seriously pukka cocktails - Brooklyn, blinker, sazerac and whisky snapper (£10). Served on vintage cake stands, we eat toasted sandwiches of the type I'd theoretically rustle up - coming home late, squiffy and famished - on my Breville toaster, if only the bloody thing hadn't gone the same way as my George Forman Grill after gathering dust in a cupboard for years. Spookily, a footman appears with a drink before I can order one. "I thought Sir would appreciate a vieux carré?" Either he's psychic, or he's been reading my reviews: here's a New Orleans classic  Sir does very much appreciate. Should I poach Mr Flogg's flunky for my personal Passepartout? My drinking companion, editor of an in-flight mag aimed at Euro-yoof, is also down with his drink, a Bobby Burns, if not the company - decidedly straight and mainstream. "We're in Mayfair not Dalston, Dorothy!" Mr Fogg's, and its owners' other bars Bunga Bunga, Maggie's and Bart’s aren't aimed at me even if  I do (technically) live in Chelsea. Merchant banker-infested Earls Court is no longer the louche locale I was originally drawn to. Gilkes has the toff market all taped up, and (top) hats off to him for that. At least  Made In Chelsea dry cleans its clobber and washes under its oxters -  not something that can be said of the cruddy Clapton contingent.  Ollie and Millie's silly vanilli sort notwithstanding, this Mayfair blast is totes Fogg-horny.

15 Bruton Lane, W1J 6JD 7299 1200 http://mr-foggs.com 

GOAT, Chelsea

(Never marry a goat in boats)

Despite living nearby, I always avoided this pub when it was The Goat and Boots. It's a pity  a friend of mine who married someone she first met there didn't follow my example. Days before her wedding, she asked me whether I thought she was too young to get hitched. It was clear to me that, as a result of a particularly cruel and complex childhood, craving security, she was about to say 'yes' to the first geezer that had offered to put a ring on her finger. Through rose-tinteds, she saw Sir Galahad where I saw the shite in not-so-shining armour he'd turn out to be, two kids, divorce and a bitter custody/ alimony battle later. My point is, I generally know what will work - and GOAT, after a wholesale makeover that has turned the moribund tavern into a gleaming post-industrial pizzeria/ diner/ cocktail bar has success written all over it. Firstly, the place looks good - particularly the split-level lounge upstairs whose wine and bubbles are honestly priced. Thin-crust pizza slathered in gloriously unctuous goo is 'the best I've ever tasted,' reckons my date. I wouldn't go that far: I still daydream about a sloppy Giuseppe I locked lips with on Long Island one summer, but if I were the MD of Zizzi, I'd be dangling a fat contract under GOAT's pizza chef's Neapolitan nose. If you're looking for a bop, an old skool DJ, housed in a reclaimed church pulpit, turns the first floor bar into the Devil's playground at weekends. Chipper staff, and the young Kiwi/ Russian couple that owns GOAT are utter sweethearts. But best of all, is a wee hush bar lurking behind an anonymous door. Cleverly done out like a study in a dour Edwardian manse - set to a scratchy 30's jazz soundtrack - The Chelsea Prayer Room comes on like a dipso vicar's guilty secret. Cocktails are on the money at £10 for Rhubarb Bellini and Woodford Reserve bourbon, sherry, lemon and plum bitters flip, Spanish Harlem. Any negatives? That depends on your tolerance for the sort of gilded clientele synonymous with this particular part of Cameron and Osborne's Britain. Hence, Willie Windsor's sister-in-law Pippa Perky-Bottom, and what looks like every extra ever featured in a certain TV series 'starring' the sort of silver-spoon-fed Binky Bellends that give eugenics a bad name, are in the house when I visit. Had my friend wed a goat of their ilk, her divorce settlement might have been considerably more generous than custody of the vacuum cleaner her lardy, tight- wad, waste-of-space husband gave her as a birthday present. 

333 Fulham Road SW10 9QL 7352 1384 www.goatchelsea.com/

3 Cromwell, South Kensington

I have been to so many different incarnations of this townhouse bar/ members club/ restaurant, they blur into one largely because they were universally dire - Dorsia the latest dud to exit the building. My pal Auntie Lynne - a seminal 60's dolly bird - says this pile was a 'with it' scenek in its heyday as The Cromwellian when everyone who was anyone - from the Stones to those too stoned to remember - partied at this stucco-pillared pile. Hendrix played his first London gig here and Elton (before he was even 'Elton') gigged in its basement discotheque. (Fun history lesson here thecromwellian.wordpress.com/ )  What Mick , Marianne and their Swing 60s gang would make of  3 Cromwell - new from posh party organiser Howard Spooner - is anybody's guess. Cool London has swings out East, leaving SW7 to the Made In Chelsea set - those toffy twats that make me glad I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth...or up my nose, more likely. Tonight's shindig is fuelled by nothing more sinister than booze - big spender bubbles, doable mojitos and a gum-botheringly astringent gin punch. Served gratis, it's saying something that it's left unfinished by my three hooch Hoover homies, none of whom rate 3 C... although junior sports journo from Croydon is hardly the gaff's target demographic, to be fair. The main bar and (steak/frites/salad-only) restaurant's punked-up jokey country '"hice" decor doesn't look much different from Dorsia, as I recall it. Garish neon lighting in the Stygian disco (do something about the hellish pong from the loos, guys) suggests a Hamburg porn video arcade - wipe-clean padded walls, a private booth. The sort of wankers who'll dig the new Cromwellian are quite possibly among those on Tatler's list of London's most eligible bachelors under 30 whose most attractive feature is their impending inheritance. As ’a tongue in cheek nod to aristocratic service of yesteryear,' I'm told, staff sports tweed and flat caps. In another nod to yesteryear, the soundtrack lurches chaotically from Bob Marley to Elvis with a bit of 70s jazz funk thrown in. It's as if someone hit the iPod shuffle button. Did the DJ spin the old regulars' discs - The Animals, The Beatles, Stevie Wonder or The Hollies, one of whom, 60's chick Lynne knocked back the first night she came here? I can't say. After barely 20 minutes, I'm at the bus stop. Bus Stop? The Hollies? See what I did there?  http://tinyurl.com/ccd83gt

3 Cromwell Rd SW7 3397 7838 www.3cromwell.com 

Upper West, Chelsea

Some claim it is to be the party of the year. It should have been the party of last year, but the grand opening of this gaff has been rescheduled twice. Tonight, it's actually happening. With Made In Chelsea's Cheska as chief cheerleader - tweeting rapturously about her friend Alexander Nall-Cain's 'new amazing club' on the King's Road - we're on the red carpet at Upper West. I'm excited. This venue - like Alexander's pater, Lord Brocket, has previous form. As The Aretusa, it was the epicentre of Swinging London. John and Yoko made their first coupled-up public appearance here,  and a former Vogue cover girl/ King's Road dolly bird of my acquaintance claims it was the 1960s equivalent of Studio 54. On which note, Upper West fancies it is set to bring a dose of New York 'über-style'  to London. As an ex-NewYorker, an underage regular at Studio 54, Upper West sounds right up my strada. Oh! Dear! Judging by the decor, the decade that springs to mind is the 90s... as furnished by The Reject Shop and lit by Texas Homecare (remember those two early high street casulaties?)  As for New York style: what bit of that great metropolis has escaped me? Canarsie? The 54; it's not. There again, Alex's partner Jad Lahoud 'spent two years at Amika..one of the capital's coolest venues.' As I've always rated that Kensington fleshpot marginally less attractive than HMP Pentonville, our idea of 'über-style' is never going to accord. As for the promised 'amazing roof garden'... 'We're waiting for warmer weather' claims Alexander. This, I take to be public school boy code for 'it ain't bleedin finished, squire, innit?' No matter. The Chelsea sticks in their uniform night drag - think Essex girl Amy Childs, only paler, and much less intelligent despite the private education - squeal like baby seals excited to have washed up together on this new pleasure beach. Their male counterparts - who look like younger versions of Michaels Heseltine, Gove or Prince ..... of Kent - do that strange backslappy bromance thing Eton and Windsor boys (as in went to Eton/ belong to the House of Windsor) do whenever they meet. We drink Champagne which, on closer inspection, turns out to be Arestel Cava...currently £3.99 at a certain supermarket - nearest branch, Clapham Junction. For all this lot know, Lidl is a downmarket ski resort in Austria. We're served fried macaroni cheeseballs and mini-hot dogs gone cold. Should have gone to Iceland. That's a shop not a Nordic isle where daddy got his fat banker fingers badly burnt, by the way. The night's 'stars' - Ollie, Cheska and the rest of their ridiculous reality show's cast show up, just as I'm legging it. I may live in the Royal Borough, but I'm sooo not Made In Chelsea, clearly. A Twitpic (above), posted by host Alex, neatly sums up my view on the whole poshy-doshy scene that is a rite of passage for the young SW3 set. Spool forward to  reel 2: the typical female Upper Westie (let's call her Lucinda), now 55, fat and fukt, will be stranded out West in the converted Marlborough manse she hung on to in the divorce settlement with Rupert after the slimy toad was caught rogering Roger, his coke-crazy banker gym buddy/ best man at their 2014 Chelsea registry office wedding. Gaga on Gordon's gin at an hour when others are contemplating getting up, Lucinda's crumpet face will crumple as it turns to Lolly the labrador, her only true friend, asking through her tears, how it ever came to this.
107 King's Road SW3 http://upperwestlondon.com

Bodo's Schloss, Kensington

As 'with-it' teenagers, my sister and I were condemned to draw lots to decide our holiday school  reciprocal visit destinations. She was dispatched to rural Austria; I to Sainte Maxime, just across the bay from swinging Saint Tropez. Hanging out with Johnny Hallyday and Bardot at Les Caves du Roy, aged 14? Bring it on! So began my love affair with France. My sibling's tales of her host, frosty Frau Frumpenlumpen (think Rosa Klebb in From Russia With Love), mandatory cold showers, not so hot local talent, and dumplings and schlag (cream) for breakfast, put me right off the first nation to sign up to Herr Hitler's world vision. Consequently, I have never set foot in the land of the Edelweiss - as immortalised by Vince Hill through the hi-fidelity speakers of my grandmother's Grundig gramophone, granted pride-of-place in its polished teak flip-top cabinet. Sloaney ponies, however, adore Austria - regularly bunking off to Kitzbuhel where, shickered on schnapps at chalet parties, they hope to do Udo the randy ski-instructor. This then, explains the decor at Bodo's Schloss, the new adventure playground from the chaps behind Mahiki - another magnet for misbehaving toff-totty and their public school boy admirers; the elite heirs to Osborne and Cameron who will one day be in charge of running (down) what's left our once great nation. Cheesier than fondue, this ersatz chalet bar/ club/ diner - all pine cladding, kitsch gingham checks and hunting lodge gubbins - is straight out of Maplin's circa Gladys Pugh. 'Tonight, campers, we'll be getting you all Matterhorny when we crown Miss Lovely Legs and Alpine Twin Peaks of 1960 in the Heidi Hi bar... located to the right of the Olympic-sized swimming pooo-ul.' The place is rammed. The boys preen, giving off that inbred air of entitlement that says they will never know the price of a pint of milk, or what it is to have to struggle to find the down-payment on a modest two-bed starter flat in the sticks ('You expect me to live in FULHAM? No way, man!') Shark-eyed trust fund Tarquins encircle the bait - lissom lasses presumably shipped in by charabanc for 'model night', as our waiter describes it. My date, a bona fide glossy mag cover girl, looks unconvinced. 'There is a big market for hand models, I suppose.' But let's not be sniffy, here. The vibe is electric - free shots every time a cowbell clangs see to that - and everyone is having a ball on a dance-floor at the back of Lonely Goatherd's cabin. I'm in no shape to throw shapes: full of strudel, und schnitzel mit noodles served by Hansel and Gretel in lederhosen and dirndls, I'm gluhweined to my chair. No matter; the party comes to me in the form of the Von Trapp Family Players' deranged cousins who dementedly bash out Village People hits on their glockenspiels and oompah band horns. Cover girl, whose mascara is running, 'hasn't laughed this much in ages.' At £8.50, cocktails are fair, but avoid the Saint Bernard, a bit of a dog if you're not big on sickly-sweet. Instead, order Ice Castle - ‘a never ending supply of our signature (vodka, peach and passion fruit) cocktail topped with up to 10 bottles of Dom Pérignon’ - sold to the coot with the Coutt's card at £5,000!  If I were him, I'd love this joint too. Bodo's is wunderbar if you’re Made In Chelsea out to get schlossed. Hip Dalston Guardianisti, however, might pray for an avalanche to hit Kensington. 

2A Kensington High Street, W8 www.bodosschloss.com