Mystical Mixology at The Bloomsbury Club
The roaring twenties were the golden age of cocktails, a time when the bohemian Bloomsbury Set gathered in glamorous speakeasy bars to exchange notoriously clever, witty bon mots, deep thoughts, and, er, get hammered.
I like to imagine I’d have been right at home among Virginia Woolf and her hedonistic pals, and there is nowhere that allows you to indulge in that fantasy better than The Bloomsbury Club, a place so evocative of that glorious bygone era you can almost taste it.
Hidden beneath the sumptuous Bloomsbury Hotel, it’s dangerously dark and intimate, with just the right blend of sexy and sophisticated; a soothing singer adds to the louche atmosphere.
Now the history buffs among you may recall that, as well as the artists and literary legends, this area was also made famous by archaeologists Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922, which led to London being gripped by Egyptomania.
And the Bloomsbury Set believed they shared the ancient Egyptian philosophy that peering deep into the human psyche would reveal universal truths and that the true function of all art, however expressed, should be to swing open the doors of perception.
Cocktails to suit your character
Yes, yes, that may all be a big old mouthful of mumbo jumbo, but it is this philosophy that has inspired the bar’s new cocktail menu. Not only are the twelve drinks on offer named after those weird and wonderful hieroglyphs that were found carved in stone near the pyramids, but the flavours are based on their deep and hidden meanings.
Of course, you don’t simply select your favourite from a menu, oh no that would be far too basic. In fact, you don’t choose at all, the cocktail chooses you. In true archaeological style we had to solve a riddle first.
A waitress presented us with a giant and elaborately carved pyramid, and removed the top to reveal replica mummified bodies, each of which represented a cocktail. Then we were handed a magnetic pendulum to slowly circle over the top until it made contact with a tiny wooden mummy. And that apparently is the drink the Egyptian gods would like you to try. It sounds a bit bonkers, and it was, but also very fun and encouraged us to try flavours we may have steered clear of otherwise.
