Rum Kitchen/ Rum Cellar, Notting Hill

(above: the way we were. Police vans blockade the 'Front Line') 

From the same people as Ping in SW5, and seemingly assembled from packing crates and sundry jetsam and flotsam, Rum Kitchen is a fair representation of a gaily painted Caribbean beach. 'Gay' would have been a dirty word to the sort of teeth-suckin' Caribbeans who once colonised this street when it was the 'Front Line' - skanky, skunky Yardies who bleated about how discriminated against they were in Thatcher's 'racist Britain', whenever the poor souls weren't busy burning 'batty boys', or planning to. Tonight, I've invited along MsMarmiteLover, queen of the London supperclub scene who agrees with my assessment of the Kitchen's rummy cocktails as 'patchy.'  Mama’s Guinness Punch works well but a daiquiri is as cloying as any alcopop I've tasted. Starters and mains are similarly hit and miss: the seasoning on jerk chicken, and a chilli jam served with crisp-coated salt fish fitters, both lack kick. Ms M's 'Carib veg rundown - leafy green callaloo stew served with rice - wouldn't be much missed if it were run down by a passing police van, while heat trumps flavour in seafood gumbo served in a bland broth with cold cornbread. Diners get to access late-night members club Rum Cellar, a funky dark shebeen downstairs. Decorated with battered luggage of the type carried by the area’s original West Indian emigrants aboard steamships conveying them to the promised land - in reality, a life of poverty, menial labour and grim lodgings in reviled  landlord Peter Rachman's squalid Notting Hill rookeries. Nowadays, W11's trustafarians and royals - rum bugger Prince Harry, a fan, not in da house tonight - slum it in style here to calypso, reggae, afro and low rider soul sounds spun by dexsmiths such as Fun Lovin’ Criminals’ DJ Fast. Choose from over 100 fine rums served straight up or, in tin mugs, with mixers‘n'Ting, as in Jamaica’s national grapefruity fizzy pop.   

6 -8  All Saints Rd. W11 7920 6479 www.therumkitchen.com

Based on a review for www.squaremeal.co.uk

Lonsdale, Notting Hill

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

http://www.thelonsdale.co.uk