Drink - Victoria Moore inhales more than she bargained for in a cigar bar
A lip-curlingly vehement anti-smoker, my latest love is adamant that in 30 years' time cigars, along with generation Clinton, will be extinct. He abhors the sight of young, pudgy-faced pinstripes playing the big tycoon - or even worse, playing their fathers - and thinks a girl with a smoke is worse than a girl in a polo neck and trousers. Myself, I agree with the president. A cigar can be very sexy in a woman.
I don't want anyone spoiling my fun, so I take my friend Nina to the sleek restaurant Che on London's patriarchal St James's Street. We bypass the eating bit and go straight downstairs to the cigar lounge, expecting to find a collection of gentlemen of a certain age cheek by jowl, puffing away on the sofas. Not quite. The lighting is low and moody, the decor relaxed and brown. An entire wall has been given over to a grand display of cigars in vast glass-fronted cabinets. But it's not stuffy. It's modern meets traditional, and the design is so seamless I can't actually find my way to the toilets because the doors are masquerading as pieces of wall. The only discordant element is the choice of music: why are they playing Chic's "Le Freak"?
Nina says she feels like dancing, or at least rolling her head around. I hope a cigar might be mellowing. But what to choose? I am a cigar virgin who smokes no more than two guilty cigarettes a week and here, bewilderingly, there are more than 60 kinds on offer. Even more confusingly, we came with the intention of drinking brandy and now suddenly crave Brandy Alexanders. Is it a good idea to smoke cigars with a creamy drink like that? The waiter says it's fine, we must just be careful to choose a cigar with a flavour that will balance out the sweetness of the cocktail and he can help us do that. At this point, however, we turn a page in the drinks menu and are thrown into chaos.
The choice of fine spirits is breathtaking. Even more alluringly, Che has matched cigars with drinks and given descriptions that sound so delicious I think I might like to set them on a plate and take them upstairs to the restaurant to devour with a knife and a fork. The cigar lounge manager, Neil Millington, confides that he and two colleagues spent an entire evening smoking and drinking their way through the list to see for themselves what ought to be matched with what.
"The cigar should not overpower the drink, nor the drink the cigar," he explains. "And the fatter the cigar, the smoother it tends to be." So, for example, a Martini, which has quite a mild flavour and is usually drunk as an aperitif, is set against an easy H Upmann No 2. Neil's favourite combination is a colheita - a single vintage tawny port, in his case Quinta do Noval 1976 - with an Epicure No 1. I seize on the colheita and order the 1982 vintage. It arrives just as the young man - Jeremy - sitting next to us asks the waiter to bring Nina and me a Maker's Mark apiece. Jeremy is in Russian property. He even has a real, live Russian sitting next to him at whom Nina gabbles gutturally, bonding over bourbon. Carried away with the romance of the cigar, I speculate to myself that the property line is probably a mafia cover.
I don't really want to blow my own cover by spluttering over the cigar (a Le Hoyo Series Du Depute, chosen by the waiter). So I pass it to Nina, the better, I say, to concentrate on the velvety caramel of my port.
"You've just got to keep on sucking," had been Neil's helpful tip.
"Remember, don't inhale," says the waiter sternly as he departs. Nina puts the Du Depute between her lips and tries to swill the smoke around her mouth. Almost immediately, a look of horror crosses her face. "I inhaled," she gasps. "And it's like snogging a very ugly person." What can she mean? "You get a horrible taste in your mouth, you can't breathe and then you wish you hadn't done it." Cigars might be very sexy on some women - and not just Monica - but we've got some practising to do.
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