Drink
My friend Sarah and I go to the Voodoo Lounge in London's Leicester Square for a drink. Three hours later we are still here, and it has to be said that no other place in the vicinity could have induced us to stay so long.
Only people with a mental age of under seven, or tourists, enjoy Leicester Square. Sarah and I are here to celebrate 1 December, the official beginning of the festive drinking season, so we have a long evening ahead of us. To reach the Voodoo Lounge we have to negotiate the neon lights, and the funfair and the candyfloss in the square, not to mention a thousand daytrippers. It's almost Blackpool, which is precisely the point. December drinking is no longer about cosy tots of whisky and huddling round a smouldering yule log; it's about raw vulgarity and getting hammered on the most expensive cocktails you can find, and if you can't find any a bottle of vodka will do instead.
Quite frankly, Sarah and I are expecting the Voodoo Lounge, which is co-owned by the Rolling Stones, to be severely tacky. It isn't. Not quite.
These days you can virtually gauge the metropolitan hip rating of a bar and its customers by the drinks it sells. The Voodoo lays claim to coolness and, with its discreet (for Leicester Square) entrance, dark, plush seating, celebrity attendance level and decor that appears to engulf the bar in flames, it almost is. But when I ask the barman which cocktails are most popular, he says Seabreezes. Seabreezes. The vodka-cranberry-grapefruit mix is a firm favourite of mine, but Seabreezes are to 1995 what royal blue mascara was to 1984. They looked good at the time.
Over the summer the smart set began to drink Cosmopolitans, which are a variation on the theme - vodka, cranberry, fresh lime or lemon and Cointreau - and have the desirable trait of fomenting general disagreement about how they're made, so that a whole culture has sprung up around them. Some consider the Cosmopolitan to be a version of a classic martini, flavoured with just a smidgen of fruit juice and Cointreau; for others it is a long, refreshing drink. I mean, how much better is a drink that only your favourite barman can mix to perfection?
The Voodoo doesn't have the Cosmopolitan on its list, which is surprising because it's the big cocktail this Christmas (though they do point out that theirs is a temporary menu as they have 60 stolen every day). But when I ask for one the barman is unfazed. Not only does he shake it without referring to a sneaky under-the-bar cheat-sheet, he offers me the choice of long (with ice, in a tumbler) or short (martini glass). Better still, it's good and strong.
(I like my Cosmopolitans thus: two measures of vodka, two of cranberry juice, half of lime juice and half of Cointreau, shaken with ice. The Voodoo make theirs thus: one and a half measures Absolut Citron, half of Cointreau and two and a half of cranberry juice.)
We struggle back to the bar to order more. Head barman Kevin Jackson says the New York import was originally made with watermelon juice, and that one of the reasons for its popularity is the vodka element: "Vodka's so out of control at the moment." (And so are we, now on our fourth.) Everyone loves vodka because they think it's going to keep their waistline slender. Oh, the vanity of a drinker. So what's the next big cocktail, then? He's not sure but one thing's certain: the drinking public is so fickle that Cosmopolitans will probably be unfashionable before you can say, "Down in one". So, as they're so delectable, Sarah and I decide not to waste any time about ordering the next five or six.
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