Branded Male

Christmas spirits

One of the treats I picked up for myself while buying Christmas books for friends and family this weekend was Everyday Drinking, a little compendium of articles about booze by the late Kingsley Amis.

Talented novelist, enthusiastic womanizer and jovial tippler (as well as father of the somewhat less jovial Martin), Amis had all the qualities I require of an icon. He even had a Bond fixation, and wrote a novel about everyone's favourite spy under the pen name Robert Markham. (It's called Colonel Sun and is not half bad.)

Everyday Drinking is a useful antidote to our increasingly health-conscious world, because it is wholly unrepentant about the pleasures of consuming alcohol. Amis clearly sees drinking as a natural, sociable and entirely acceptable pursuit, although the book does include a chapter on hangovers. This suggests that hangovers combine two elements: the physical (headache, nausea, dehydration) and the metaphysical (guilt, shame, paranoia).

Perhaps what makes the rest of the book so shameless is the fact that it is slightly out of date. It has a late 70s "mine's a Cinzano and she'll have a Babycham" feel about it that adds to its charm while keeping the reader at a distance. This may also explain Amis's somewhat baffling approach to cocktails. For example, in lieu of an olive or a twist in his dry martini, he insists on two of those pallid and disgusting cocktail onions, which have surely been banned since. And in an even more off-putting moment, he suggests adding "cucumber juice" to the mix; perhaps - God help us - floating a slice of cucumber on top of the resulting concoction.

Still, most of the rest of the book is a laugh-out-loud series of observations about drink and drinking folk. By the way, Amis has found the ideal way of drawing attention to the fact that the host at a party is being a bit mean with the wine. You simply drop your glass on the floor and say: "Oh dear. Lucky it was empty."

Martinis in Barcelona

If you travel enough, you inevitably end up returning to places. Which is good, because there's something deeply satisfying about arriving in a great cosmopolitan city where you do not reside, and knowing exactly where to get a decent drink. It's even better if you know a handful of people who are willing to come and enjoy it with you.

Such is the case with Barcelona, home of one of my favourite families in the entire world, as well as an excrutiatingly cool design agency called Vasava, with whom I worked on a project for Diesel a couple of years ago. And this weekend I somehow arranged it so that we could all meet at a bar called Dry Martini.

It's a Barcelona institution: a place of dark wood, red banquettes and surrealist artworks. The customers range from elderly rakes to young guns in jeans. A local character, a well-known transvestite singer, pops in every night to discreetly proffer CDs of her flamenco performances - or single red roses. But there is no flamenco here. The soundtrack is the smart rattle of ice in a cocktail shaker. The list of cocktails is long, but you can't go wrong with the classic dry martini: gin with a rumour of vermouth, and an olive.

A discreet door at the back of the bar leads to a restaurant called Speakeasy. But unless you know it's there, none of the staff will mention it to you. Book in advance and you can disappear into a slightly more modern, but equally suave environment. Barcelona can be a vibrant, frenetic city: but here, it shows off its more discreet side.

Dry Martini and Speakeasy: Aribau 162-166, Barcelona.

Hotel bar none

Last night, we found ourselves enjoying a quiet drink at the bar of the Café de la Paix, the grandiose brasserie appropriately attached to the Hotel Intercontinental Paris Le Grand. It's right next to the Opéra Garnier on the Right Bank. We were on our way to Harry's Bar, our regular haunt near the Opéra, when we decided on a change of scene.

The extremely pleasant experience nudged me into writing a note in praise of hotel bars. I've been in a few of them in my time. At the Café de la Paix, you perch on high stools - with proper seat-backs - upholstered in what appears to be python, before a gleaming bar that sparkles with tempting bottles. To your right is the vast expanse of the restaurant itself, which essentially looks like a palace with extra seating. A murmur of conversation drifts up to the lofty ceiling, which is decorated with trompe l'oeil paintings and gilded plasterwork. You don't get that in your local pub. A young man - or in our case, a young woman - in a smart black waistcoat takes your order and serves you with efficient charm. For the record, I had a very dry gin martini with a twist of lemon peel, while the Branded Female went for a pina colada with vodka instead of rum (which always attracts raised eyebrows).

There's something intriguing about hotel bars. Perhaps it's their air of transience. You never know who's a traveller or a regular; a guest or an interloper. I often feel as if I've been plunged into scene from a film noir. That was certainly the case last night. Apart from the Branded Female - whose flame red hair recalls Rita Hayworth - there was a young Russian girl with a much older French man, a rumpled academic buried in a book, and a towering albino gentleman with the quietest and most timid voice imaginable. Honestly, it was a cast you couldn't invent.

When you travel, hotel bars of the four star variety are a refuge. When you are at home, they are a place to enjoy a quiet drink alone without feeling like a loser. Or they are the ideal setting for a romantic conversation. Either way, elegant surroundings and good service are virtually guaranteed.

Apart from the Café de la Paix, there are many other great hotel bars in Paris. For a hipper and more boisterous affair, I recommend the Murano Urban Resort (pictured), on the fringes of the Marais. Dress in black. And if you're a high-heeled fashionista - or you're dating one - you can hardly go wrong with the bar of the Plaza Athénée, a short stroll from the Champs Elysées. It delivers one of the best martinis in town, and it's a taste of luxury for far less than the Alain Ducasse restaurant next door.

Absinthe of malice

The last time I drank absinthe was at a club in Soho (London) whose name now escapes me. Whether that's because it was a few years back or because I was already too far gone to form memories at that point is open to question. But I was intrigued to read in Advertising Age that absinthe is currently being marketed as a trendy drink in the United States, much as it was in Britain at the time of my bar crawl (literal, I fear) in the late 1990s.

If you're into living dangerously, absinthe has much to recommend it. A favoured drink of Oscar Wilde, it's said to have contributed to the slow death of Modigliani (among other illicit substances, notably hashish and ether) and to the madness of Van Gogh, perhaps even provoking the famous ear-slicing incident (not the whole ear, contrary to popular mythology - but a sizeable chunk of it). Hemingway, that inveterate boozer, was inevitably a fan, once writing in his diary: "Got tight on absinthe last night. Did knife tricks."

You may either be pleased or disappointed to learn that only low levels of thujone, the hallucinogenic chemical deriving from wormwood (artemisia absinthium, the plant that gave absinthe its name) survive in current varieties. This is hardly surprising, as it's what got absinthe banned in France in 1915. These days absinthe is a herbal, vaguely medicinal, perfectly legal yet undeniably potent tipple. The variety of brands available include Kubler (the most common in the US) from Switzerland and several from France, including La Fée, Libertine, Partisane and a Pernod-branded offering. More amusingly, Goth rocker Marilyn Manson has launched his own brand - called Mansinthe - in association with Swiss producer Matter-Luginbühl.

So will absinthe take off in the States, as the marketers of Kubler hope? It's notable that on my various return trips to London, I've never seen anybody ordering one. That could be because, I'm afraid to say, most absinthe tastes unspeakably vile. And also because it takes a lot of guts to order a drink known as "la fée verte" - the green fairy. I bet that's one slogan the marketers of today's absinthe won't be resurrecting.

Searing is believing

Is it my imagination, or are men doing all the cooking these days? I know quite a few couples in which the guy takes care of the daily meal. I certainly spend more time in the kitchen than the Branded Female - and get a lot more pleasure out of it, too.
I think it's the double impact of sexual politics and cultural role models. Women now instinctively resist cooking lest it turns them into housewife/slaves, while men have the examples of Gordon Ramsey and, to a certain extent, Jamie Olivier to follow. (Personally, my vote goes to Marco Pierre White, the knife-wielding, cigar-smoking, customer-berating pioneer of new British cuisine.)
And what's not to love about cooking, from a male point of view? It involves sharp blades and flames. It requires investing in gadgets and poring over geekish tomes. It enables one to spout arcane knowledge. Plenty of guy stuff there. Tonight, for example, I'm cooking seared tuna. The very word seared sounds cool.
Better still was the fact that I got to go to the market, which is one of the most pleasurable things to do in Paris on a Sunday morning. There's a bucolic little street market in my neighbourhood. How Parisian I felt as I bumped into my neighbours: "Ahhh, le British!" How delightful it was to take the time to chat to the local wine merchant about which wines would go best with the meal (we opted for a Minervois and a Bourgogne Aligoté, in case you're interested).
So now I can cook for the Branded Female and one of her girlfriends, who is coming over to watch the French election results. In the end, that's why men enjoy cooking. We want to provide. And we want to impress. Since we can no longer spear mammoths, we sear tuna.