THE BLUE BAR

The Blue Bar doesn’t take reservations, so if you want a table, arrive early; 2005 should just about do the trick. It is, as you’ve gathered, both hip and compact – just 50 seats, and it feels even more intimate. With the fruit-and-cherub plaster mouldings and almost austere blue walls, it looks a little like a luxurious Georgian drawing room blinged up with a crocodile-print leather floor and a onyx bar installed at one end. The ambience, though, is decidedly chic, verging on the oriental, an impression reinforced by the red wall lamps, dark-wood-framed chairs and bento boxes of nibbles (containing the capital’s finest spiced cashew nuts, we can reveal).

Popularity with both A-listers and the cocktail cognoscenti means you may have to dawdle at the bar before being seated, but take the opportunity to browse both the cashews and the drinks list. If you can snare bar supervisor Viviana, grill her for pointers: it’s one of the few occasions you’ll be glad you met a girl with a taste for champagne. Creator of a number of the bar’s original numbers, mostly featuring fizz, she might point you towards some of her favourites – the Grape Smash (Ciroc vodka, white and black grape muddled with vanilla sugar and Bollinger champagne), or perhaps the Evergreen (Zubrowka bison grass vodka, melon liqueur, green apple juice and ginger beer). And yes, you’ve spotted another theme: an array of premium vodkas sits alongside cognacs, wines and champagnes on the frankly opulent (and deliciously leather-aromatic) bar menu.

Given the classy nature of the clientele – it’s an ‘if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it’ kind of place – the Latin beats tend to overlay the sound of moneyed Belgravians and the international jet-set getting gently and genteelly sloshed. We think they know what they’re doing.