My one remaining non-gin-addled brain cell recalls a strange off-Portobello bar named Jac’s. It boasted a fish tank but fishier still, a bonkers bouillabaisse of mad trouts, ne’er-do-wells and Guy Ritchie-style Mockney ‘gangsters’. This was before vapid blonde twigs, sappy merchant bankers, Mini-driving ex-minor public schoolboy estate agents and future PMs that sound and look like one of their sort elbowed in, colonising W11. Jac’s became trustafarian joint, Lonsdale. At Lonsdale’s relaunch party - same name, new owner, new offer - there’s a new wave of BPs; that’s as in beaux peeps not oily operators. My doon-frae-the Trossachs relative, an unworldly wee soul and a chip off the Susan Boyle block, is so taken with one towering, honey-skinned, swivel-hipped, pompadoured deity (see pic), she fires in and tells him so. I’m agog at such un-Londonly chutzpah. Him too. If this fine specimen is representative of the talent, how long before Lonsdale is crawling with model agents? Its swish interior suggests a Cardiff cocktail lounge Shirley Bassey wowed circa 1960. Drinks are uniformly diva-tastic; elderflower martini rocks and crème de cassis trickling through the shaved ice of our Russian Spring Punch suggests an amethyst cluster fit for a Goldfinger ring for the Dame. New Notting Hill will adore it.
Look! Willa Keswick, flatmate to The Evening Standard's self confessed posho contributor Richard Dennen, turned up at the launch working a trend that Kate Moss has been working since waaaaaay before she morphed into Gillian Taylforth.
48 Lonsdale Rd W11 7727 4080
