Smith and Whistle, Mayfair

Here’s yet another bar with yet another tall tale to tell about heroes and villains a twee theme that’s much more imaginatively executed at the likes of Evans & Peel, Mr. Fogg's and Uncle Seymour’s Parlour than at this glitzy, soulless take on a Jazz Age cocktail lounge. Apparently, inspired by fictitious 1920s sleuth Smith - a poor man’s Poirot - and gentleman/ vagabond Whistle, it’s the first of the hotel’s public spaces to be refurbished. Let’s hope owners Starwood/ Sheraton Hotels make a better fist of the potentially glorious Palm Court Bar than they have here. Bar food includes devilled whitebait; pork brawn and piccalilli and beer-battered fish fingers, chips and mushy peas (£10.50). Chapel Down vineyard’s Curious Brew ales on tap, plus a selection of good Scottish beers, will give tourists a flavour of Britain’s craft ale revolution. Jotted down on gumshoe Smith’s leather-bound notepad, £10 cocktails include Mayfair Mystery (Absolut, Jägermeister, Sezchuan pepper honey, elderflower and chilli). Apparently, Smith and Whistle would occasionally meet up here on the sly and trade tip-offs. With 1920s gin, lemon and honey classic, Bee’s Knees, incorrectly listed as 'tequila, goats cheese, pork crackling syrup and plum wine’  it looks like the crim' gave the cop a bum steer! Maybe it should be renamed Smith & Wesson, a reference to the weapon used to put the joker that dreamed up this trite tosh out of his misery.

The Park Lane Hotel Piccadilly W1J 7BX http://www.sheratonparklane.com

214 Bermondsey, The Borough

I wish I had bought a pad on Bermondsey Street when early adopter friends first spotted its soaraway potential and moved in (£300k to £2 million in 18 years? Jammy bastards!)  As things stand, I can just about stand you a round of drinks in one of this stylish enclave's numerous bars - The Garrison, Hide, East Village and now 214, a reboot of the cellar bar at Italian face-filling opportunity, Antico. Small comfy, cosy, all soft lighting honey-tone woods and tabasco leather, 214 eschews big design statement - a plus in my book in a city that now has more 'speakeasies' than the Chicago Mob could collect protection money from in a month of Sundays. In the absence of Bugsy Malone trappings, the adult theme here is a stonking range of great gins - I counted 50 on a smallish back bar where premium rums and whiskeys also vie for attention. Flights of three gins (from £12) come with house tonic - dry, peppery, earthy, bark-y, bitter, Fernet Branca-ish. Gin cocktails include aviation; Bermondsey negroni using local gin, Jensen; The Copenhagen (Bols Genever, Heering Cherry, lime and bitters, good at £9) and The Peck'em, SE15-distilled Little Bird shaken with Aperol, Cinzano B, grapefruit juice and bitters - more Portofino than Peckham to my mind. Gin junkies will be happy to find Death's Door,  Gilpin's, No.209, Bathtub Navy Strength, Xoriger various genevers and  current pash of mine, Saffron from Dijon's Gabriel Boudier. Gordon's? The barman tuts - although I retain a soft spot for the old girl having mixed it, aged 11, with bitter lemon and Dad's Eau Sauvage in an early experiment that led to a pubescent high I will never forget....followed by a tanned hide and tears before bedtime. My only gripe is 214's happy hour. If you aspire to owning a gaff in this deeply desirable faubourg, you're chained to a desk between 5 and 6pm, surely?

214 Bermondsey Street SE1 3TQ 7403 6875 www.214-bermondsey.co.uk/ 

Old Mary's, Bayswater

'Have you heard of a Bayswater bar called "Old Marys?"' asks a colleague. I have not. The name conjures up a last chance saloon for prune-skinned Paddington bears. That's not ' bear' as in MIchael Bond's creation, rather the grizzly clientele of The Old Quebec. Popular with gay bears, I visit from time to time for no other reason than its ossified punters make me look like Justin Bieber's younger bro' by comparison. (Such morale boosters are important now that I have reached an age where policeman do indeed 'look like children,' as my father long ago predicted they one day would.) 'Old Mary's'  (singular), as it happens, is a new space in a handsome old Young’s house, The Mitre Tavern. Its website reckons it's 'a speakeasy.' I disagree. But these days, isn't that the boast of just about any bar that offers any drink more complicated  than whisky and Coke? When I drop by on a Saturday evening, the place technically qualifies as a speak easy: I don't need to shout to make myself heard - another constant irritation once one's age exceeds their chest measurement - above its handful of (seemingly straight) customers. Whatever ambience there is in this semi-deserted flagstone floored cellar feels more Charles I than Chicago 1931. Apt, given the pile's spooky back story. Said to haunt the Mitre, the eponymous Mary was a Jacobean scullery maid who embarked on an upstairs-downstairs fling that ended in a bloodbath. When M'Lady discovered M'Lord Craven giving the Maidenhead - as the custom was known in Mary's native Berkshire - she plunged a knife into the hired help's hussy heart. Cue Bloody Mary on a list of drinks that also has mai tai, espresso martini and Aperol spritz (£8.25), draught ale from Meantime and Camden, and a selection of bottled craft beers. Franks and chilli dogs are also available: easy for any passing gummy old Marys to masticate, I imagine.  

 24 Craven Terrace W2 3QH 7262 5240 www.mitrelancastergate.com/ 

adapted from a review for www.squaremeal.co.uk

BYOC, Covent Garden

It should, strictly speaking, be called BYOB. BYOC, U C,  is not licensed to sell booze, merely to mix cocktails for 'guests' who bring their own hooch and pay a £20 entry fee. Served in vintage stemware, cocktails are created by adding non-alcoholic ingredients and garnishes from a rickety drinks trolley. This squeaky vintage prop -  rescued from a 1950s Terence Rattigan play by the looks of it - is wheeled from end to end of the underground bunker by owner, dapper Dan Thomson. The manoeuvre takes all of two seconds. The premise at this nanoscale bar is not unlike the deal at London's supperclubs - only supper, at BYOC, is limited to charcuterie, cheese and fruit platter. The ambience is cosy, clubby and convivial and fellow guests are encouraged to pool alcoholic resources. This gives busy bee Thomson - or a capable stand-in when Dan's off tending bar at Milk and Honey -  scope to rustle up all manner of old- and new-fashioned honeyz. Secreted in the crepuscular cellar of a small juice bar, with its scratchy blues and my-man-done-me-wrong torch songs, BYOC feels closer to the real deal than any other London 'speakeasy' - with the exception of frisson-inducing genuinely underground enterprises I can't name here, lest I find a horse's head in my bed after the cops close them down on account of my indiscretion. Testimony to Danny boy's drinks, we extend our 2-hour table booking  to four. After the ninth variation on a classic Tanqueray 10 martini - the one that involved pepper, grapefruit bitters..... and Cillit Bang kitchen cleaner for all I care by this stage - the next drink I remember, is the following morning's emergency Berocca. Annihilation never felt so good. In fact, I plan to sit out Armageddon in this get-bombed shelter. Just me, Dan, the entire stock of Gerry's Soho liquor store,  and a dozen fellow cocktail-lovin' cockroaches.
28 Bedfordbury WC2 . No telephone. For reservations info, see www.byoc.co.uk/

Flat P, Hampstead (NOW CLOSED)

Wall-to-wall coverage of summer 2012's squalid orgy of corporate greed that has turned my city into a five ring circus drones on; unlike Mayor Bozo's booming looped LU Tube tannoy announcement which has been dropped, mercifully, for being all too persuasive. The gist of his jolly irritating joyous proclamation was that all right-minded people should avoid London like the plague, abandoning it to badly dressed fans of archery, pin the tail on the donkey, mud-wrestling and midget-throwing. Thankfully, the only time the O-word crops up tonight is during a game of bitch volleyball; my sharp stylist date dismissing Team GB’s Next-designed white and gold trackies as 'chip-shop hip-hop.’ Unlike at LOGOC's venues, no seats remain unsold at Hampstead’s latest draw. In a dishy room where thirty is a squeeze and drinks are medal contenders; that’s hardly surprising. Up a Stygian staircase accessed via hot new hot dogs, sliders and bourbon joint, Dach & Sons, lies Flat P; a soft focus retro cocktail lounge pimping late-night lovelies more sexy than any local resident pop star out cruising the Heath could hope to lock lips with. To scratchy 1930s dance band tunes, we get squiffy in a jiffy. Green Fairy Sazerac; Crystal Clear Martinez (£9); lavender bitters, prosecco and pomegranate foam-topped flute, Backwards Bellini; Counted But Not Out (Chase Marmalade vodka, Aperol and Carpano red vermouth): these are the sort of quality quaffs that have gained the peeps behind Flat P a loyal following. That said, I prefer this intimate space to its big sisters, Marylebone cellar Purl (awkward layout) and Worship Street Whistling Shop which, to me, would work well as a set for a gloomy Edwardian murder mystery. The only mystery here is why they are actively courting publicity. Like Chinatown’s ECC or NYC’s PDT (Please Don’t Tell) before it, a nod and a wink has filled FP PDQ.

68 Heath Street NW3 www.dachandsons.com 

Evans And Peel, Earls Court

In a two-bit basement, in a dead-end street, in a no-hope neck of town (Earls Court), you'll find a pair of flimflams masquerading as gum-shoes. Tell ‘em Eddie Mars sent you. They’ll take care of you real nice. Welcome to the Raymond Chandler-esque twilight world of Evans and Peel. Here, beyond a cunningly concealed portal in the bogus private eyes’ dusty sepia tone office, lies a jumpin’ juke joint where - for those on the lam deemed kosher by the Big Cheese -  Shebas and Sheiks suck up hot hooch and hillbilly chow served on Clyde’s bonniest ol’ bone china. It’s a PR girl cliché, but for once ‘speakeasy’ really does sum up a clandestine parlour got up on a shoestring as a sleazy 1920’s Chicago gin-mill. Plied with £9.50 slugs, even a tough nut will sing like a canary after Auntie May’s Marmalade Bronx, Rum Runner (Diplomatico, sweet vermouth, Grand Marnier and coriander bitters) and half a dozen Sidecars. Bartenders are dressed up Sting-style; that's as in 1973 Redford and Newman flick, not pretentious Newcastle knob/ tantric twat, Sting: he works for the Police. Neat Prohibition era twists - ‘moonshine’ (Meantime ale) dispensed from a radiator and wine bottles concealed, Bowery bum-style, in paper bags - are fun film noir touches. So pull your glad rags on and get your gams down here pronto.  Historical fact: this swell caboodle - diagonally opposite the old apartment of a balled-up English royal who some say got bumped off by a torpedo (case closed, never proven) before she could become queen - was once a  dodgy dive where old queens queued to pay the rent: On which note, if you’re after a dick for hire, try E and P on for size. 
310C Earls Court Road SW5 9BA   

www.evansandpeel.com 

Blind Tiger, Battersea

Arrivals are scrutinised through an anonymous door's sliding grille. Pass the test (feel free to dress up as Spats Colombo or Sugar Kawalczyk although, as nobody else has bothered, reservations will presumably swing it) and enter Blind Tiger a semi-clandestine Roaring Twenties experience; that's as in Prohibition, the era when ‘blind tiger’ was code for an American speakeasy. In this candle-lit honytonk parlour cocktails, chow and chin-wagging are the thing. Lemongrass and lychee daiquiri, rhubarb and honey Bellini and Georgia mint julep - from a list of 'prescriptions' contained in gold envelopes handed to guests - live up to their raffish surroundings and an interesting selection of Stateside beers includes Kelham Island Pale Rider. Bistro-gastro best describes the generously apportioned food: with starters and franglais puds from £5 and mains of pork loin in pancetta with a mustard sauce, artichoke, runner beans and new potatoes (£14.95); pan-fried halibut, samphire, radicchio and gamey-good pheasant (complete with shot) on creamed mash all well received, murmerings of 'too many things on the plate' aside. There’s live juke joint music on Wednesdays, rat pack swing on Thursdays and Sunday tea parties with illicit hooch. At weekends, the venue reverts to being an annexe of Lost Society but for an alternative week night jaunt or a novel Christmas party, this Tiger lost in the back woods of Battersea could turn out to be a blinding idea.

697A Wandsworth Road SW8 7652 6526

(adapted from my review for Square Meal) 

www.blindtigerlondon.co.uk