Puppies are cuter than dogs, lambs more 'aah' than sheep, and continuing this logic, someone clearly thought that mini-hamburgers are therefore more obviously appetising than hamburgers. And given the fact that 'mini-hamburger', linguistically if not otherwise, is a bit of a mouthful, a catchy name seems in order, but I have to say, god I hate the term 'slider'. So what then am I doing in a slider bar?

Well, first of all The Player is principally an underground cocktail bar in Soho, though I usually try to avoid heading down poorly lit staircases in Soho also. But here, I've done some research and Lucky Chip are running the food so I'm guessing it's not too dodgy and we've been told many times, sometimes by people we even trust, that the Lucky Chip burger is potentially the best burger in London. This is of course a mighty claim and needs to be sampled.

Now, The Player isn't the only place where Lucky Chip burgers are available, but of the other two places, one is a 'cosy boozer in East London' between 6-10pm so no lunch service, and the other is 'a burger van double parked in Netil Market' on a Saturday between 12:30pm - 6pm. The Player's offering seems to win on many fronts - apart from the fact that they serve sliders, not burgers. Oh well, compromises sometimes need to be made.

The Player itself is brilliant and I love it not for the vintage Chuck Norris film playing on cathode ray TVs, possibly made in the same year as the film, or for the cocktails, which are brilliant, but rather for the friendly relaxed staff. Being late in the afternoon, I still had near on a full drink as closing time arrived but instead of shooing me out the door as so many uptight drinking places do, they invited me to stay indefinitely as long as I didn't mind if they carried on with a bit of work: of course not.

The menu, in card format, is pretty simple here, though the lunch menu may be a touch more simple than the simple evening menu which is hinted at on a notice board. The deal then: two sliders with fries for £10, a choice of four sides, a couple of home made dips (ketchup is freely available also) and then two dessert options. The slider choices mostly mix up cheese (yellow or blue), bacon (yes or no) and pickles/jalapenos/onions. There's a veggie burger option also.

One of the side orders arrives first: popcorn chicken with garlic aioli. Ironically for a place that sells mini-burgers, the popcorn chicken is bloody massive, the size of ping pong balls. It is however very nice and at '£4.5' it's pretty good value given how much chicken you get. If ordered with a side of fries (which would total £7) it would make an excellent meal in its own right.

When the sliders come, they do look kind of cute, so maybe the rule of smallness does hold for burgers too. Obviously I had to go for the classic cheeseburger as one of my two: american cheese, ketchup, mustard and pickles. It is very good indeed and the burger is beautifully pink inside, something which is probably harder on a small patty but these have been cooked as they should be (quickly), and the cheese is nicely melting through: so inviting. It's a delight. 

The second burger, the El Chappo sees the blue cheese completely melted and comes additionally with smoked bacon, roasted jalapenos and aioli. The bacon for me makes this too salty, especially with salty chips and I can't help but feel this would be better without it, but this is a personal preference only, never really understood the need to put bacon on a burger. They may be mini burgers but I in fact struggled to finish, it all adds up to a lot of food.

These were without doubt great mini-burgers, the best I've had, but for me the format doesn't add anything to getting a full sized burger and that would have been my preference, but again, this is personal taste and the opportunity to try two styles of burger will appeal to those who struggle with menu decisions. 

The dessert is a 'sundae of the week' or the 'brownie of the week' but since the sundae came with broken up brownie, it seemed the obvious choice. It also came with a chocolate-bourbon sauce and was as deliciously gooey as it looks.

I finished up with a Martinez, an inverse Martini where the vermouth leads and the gin plays second fiddle, add a touch of orange bitters and yum! This was a very well made cocktail.

The Player then offered two discoveries, a great place to eat (assuming you want a burger) and a great place to drink (assuming that you want a cocktail). As someone who likes both, my return is a matter of when, not if. In fact, I like it so much, I'll even live with the fact that they only do sliders.


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If you Google The Player you'll get lots of links to a silent movie so instead, follow the links below:

The Player

Lucky Chip

On a slow day in a London publishing house this must have seemed like a good idea, get one of Scotland’s most famous novelists to visit each of the distilleries in Scotland and write it up as a book. As Banks himself points out in the book, the prospect of getting paid a handsome sum of money to go drinking Scotch across the length of the country is an attractive one and so Ian Banks’ first nonfiction book was born (though it has taken me a few years to finally get around to reading it). The idea that a master wordsmith and Scotch lover goes in search of ‘the perfect dram’ is an attractive one if he can pull it off; sadly, he can’t.

He starts with a fair degree of enthusiasm with the Islay malts such as Laphroaig and Lagavulin but something soon becomes very apparent. Writing a book about 100 odd distilieries and keeping it interesting is going to be pretty difficult since i) books of whisky tasting notes are already widely available and make for poor cover to cover reading, ii) the visitor centres/tours of distilleries are pretty generic and iii) whisky itself, while wide ranging in flavour is pretty damn similar in the production process. It would be too much to say that if you’ve seen one distillery you’ve seen them all but once you’re past ten, you can probably stand down.

Accordingly the book veers away from what you think you’re going to be reading – a book on whisky – and becomes a somewhat self indulgent collection of anecdotes of Ian Banks drinking with his mates. We’re introduced to ‘Dave’ and ‘Jim’ and Ian Banks in turn becomes ‘Banksie’ as we are inducted into the group. The trouble is, most tales of things you do with your mates when drunk are funny only to you and your mates and putting it down in even half decent prose for a wider audience is not enough to salvage it unless you’re a drunk with the wit of Dudley Moore’s Arthur.

About half way through the book we get this piece of dialogue;

‘This could be your best book ever, Banksie,’ Dave says.
‘Na,’ I tell him. ‘It could just be rubbish.’
Dave pauses for a moment. ‘Yeah, but it could be your best book ever, Banksie.’

The dialogue ends there, Banksie doesn’t answer because he’s already said what he’s probably come to realise. I wondered why he should have included this piece in the book in the first place but it too is a joke. The joke though is never on him because he’s the one getting paid to write the book and the one getting paid to drink.

What’s sad is that where he could have filled the pages with the stories of the distilleries and the people and the traditions, in this book, Banksie is at the centre of every story but he’s not a comic writer and the stories fall flat. There’s the time when Banksie said ‘lake’ instead of ‘Loch’ and Jim threatened to tell everyone that Banksie had ‘been down South for too long’. We learn too of the time at a hotel where Jim, having ordered a bottle of wine and some glasses from room service, drops them causing a general commotion. Banksie tells us that ‘all of this sounds hilarious from the bathroom; I start laughing quietly to myself and I’m still giggling when the night porter arrives with the brush and pan and replacement glass.’ Yeah, I broke a glass last night too, it was crazy.

What’s more is that even for a major and popular distillery like Talisker, there is less than a page and a half dedicated to the place, and that’s a lot more space than most get. With many getting no air time at all, with 100 distilleries, there can be no more than 70 of the 360 pages of this book actually dedicated to the subject matter. There are commentaries on the Gulf war, most of Scotland’s roads (he doesn’t like the A9 but the B974 is brilliant apparently) and extensive descriptions of his Freelander, BMW M5 and other cars.

I have no doubt that Dave and Jim will love this book, and if you’re a huge Iain Banks fan and want to know what it’s like hanging out with Banksie for a few weeks, this probably comes a close second to the real thing. Personally, I’d rather get car reviews from Top Gear and comedy from Ricky Gervais. As for picking up anything about the whisky industry, if you’re interested enough to even consider reading a 360 page book on whisky then you're probably already pretty clued up on the basics and this book will not deliver much more. I put the book down when two thirds of the way through calling time on this particular road trip for I think I’ll sip my bedtime dram alone tonight having had all I can take of Dave’s, Jim’s and Banksie’s ‘wild and crazy guy’ antics. If only they were that funny. 

Bruce, Bruce and Bruce, all professors in the Philosophy Department of the University of Woolloomooloo Australia, were the genius comic creation of Monty Python and in their live shows would, cork hats on head, sing, 'The Philosopher's Song’ which included such great lines as:

Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle.
Hobbes was fond of his dram,
And René Descartes was a drunken fart.
'I drink, therefore I am.'

so introducing the classic line ‘I drink therefore I am’ to a new generation who might not have known that the original is attributed to the great WC Fields (1880-1946).

The line has now moved so conspicuously into the public domain that it borders on cliché and most authors would be foolhardy to even contemplate using it as a title for book on wine. Roger Scruton though is not most authors and the subtitle of the book ‘A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine’ provides the bridge to reclaiming the comment, for as we’ll learn in due course, Scruton sees Descartes as ‘the most overrated philosopher in history’ and he suggests drinking ‘a deep dark Rhône wine’ when you read Descartes since ‘such a wine will compensate for the thinness of the Meditations and give you rather more to talk about’.

While most authors and publishers seek to take the low road – consider The Dummy's Guide to Whatever  – Scruton moves in the opposite direction, even calling one of his books An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy where he states in the introduction that he ‘presupposes no knowledge other than that which an intelligent person is likely to possess already,’ simple things we gather like the complete works of Shakespeare, Beethoven and Wagner’s ring cycle. I can only imagine what horror a tutorial with him must have been like.

His guide to wine is more approachable than this but will still leave the average reader lost at times I suspect – I know I was. What to make of sentences like ‘as Kant brilliantly showed, the person who is acquainted with the self, who refers to himself as ‘I’, is inescapably trapped into freedom’? Yet at other times, we can just share the joy of his learning (we’re told that the Ancient Egyptians for example would classify and label wines by their social function e.g. ‘wine for tax collection day’) or sometimes, just warm to a touching story of his own humanity (yes indeed, Scruton is in fact human).

All of these aspects give the book, like a good wine, layers of complexity leaving a lasting impression on the reader long after you’ve put the book down even if you struggle with the form this lasting impression takes.

Before we finally get to the structure of the book itself, it must be pointed out that Scruton equates wine with culture and civilisation, and intoxication is different to drunkenness noting that wine intoxicates like poetry when drunk correctly through ‘measured desire’. He believes that all the problems of the world could be solved by sitting down and talking them through over a glass of good claret. Against this background he has harsh words on Islamic abstinence and notes that in surah xvi verse 7 of the Koran wine is unreservedly praised as one of God’s gifts, but following the prophet’s Medina exile, surah v verses 90-91 are less complimentary and later revelations cancel the earlier.

 But nor does the Western culture of drinking to get drunk escape his critical pen as he notes:

The drink problem that we witness in British cities stems from our inability to pay Bacchus his due. Thanks to cultural impoverishment, young people no longer have a repertoire of songs, poems and arguments or ideas with which to entertain one another in their cups. They drink to fill the moral vacuum generated by their culture, and while we are familiar with the adverse effect a drink has on an empty stomach, we are now witnessing the far worse effect of drink on an empty mind.

The book itself can be subdivided in discrete themes. It starts with a youthful Scruton ‘discovering’ good wine during his Cambridge university days as he is introduced by successive mentors to the best of red and white Burgundy and acknowledges Napoleon’s quip that ‘nothing makes life so rosy as to contemplate it through a glass of Chambertin’.

We then go on a tour of the wine regions of the world, though for Scruton, the world of wine is divided into France and everywhere else. We get a tour of both balanced in those proportions and enjoy both a history lesson and comic sketch book and giggle along the way. Sometimes, Scruton has a humorous anecdote to help on the journey (in America there is a journal called The Modern Drunkard which offers ‘useful advice on the forgotten art of staggering’) while at other times the humour is entirely accidental such as when he claims that ‘reading the literature of New Zealand feminists, animal rights activists and multi-culturalists, I long ago decided I could have no place in the intellectual life of Canterbury’.

When the world tour is over (the ‘I Drink’ part), we move to the ‘Therefore I am’ part as he discusses what ‘I’ means. This is by far and away the most difficult chapter and full absorption is not entirely required for the book to be enjoyed as a whole. After that, it’s the meaning of wine – how for example is great wine different from great art or great music and how can we understand taste? Can we describe it? Then we have ‘the meaning of whine’ where he takes a pot shot at prohibitionists and ‘mad mullahs’ who he feels are as addicted to anger as drunks are to alcohol. The last chapter sees Sartre’s Being and Nothingness become Being and Bingeing as he discusses the misuse of pleasure.

At the end of the book, we get a section on what to drink with what and here Scruton is not going anywhere near ‘pinot with lamb’, rather, one should drink Tuscan wine with Hegel and a New Zealand Chardonnay with Schopenhauer, philosophy’s unrelenting pessimist. Most philosophers you could name and many you couldn’t are briefly discussed here in the contexts of their work and the corresponding pairing.

However, a special mention goes to Sam the Horse with whom Scruton clearly enjoyed a close relationship. We learn by the middle of the book that ‘in my duties as a wine critic, I try out a full bottle on Sam the Horse, stirring a glass-full into his oats and studying his reaction, I can make no distinction between his relishing the wine and his merely enjoying it’. By the back though we learn that despite what has just been said, ‘Sam has his preferences’. We are told that Sam the Horse most eagerly gobbles his oats when laced with rosé, with Scruton suggesting that Sam’s firm favourite is Amethystos from Greece, ‘available at Oddbins’; I can only wonder to know how the producers of the wine and Oddbins feel about that fact.

Overall, this is a satisfying and challenging read and a book that should appeal to wine lovers and wine thinkers. One feels from the book that Scruton himself is a fascinating individual though not without his own issues, painting a picture of a man nursing a bottle of Bordeaux alone in a backwater French farm with only Sam the Horse for company. His sheer intelligence though and scope of learning together with an often brilliant turn of phrase and a gentle but tickling wit ensure a good read. One can only smile at his ‘first principle’ of drinking that despite his rants against spirits, beer and cocktails (i.e. anything that’s not wine) states that ‘you should drink what you like, in the quantities you like. It may hasten your death, but this small cost will be offset by the benefits to everyone around you’. That is most certainly my kind of philosophy.

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls.
Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.

     Othello Act III, William Shakespeare

 
Why is Mark Hix, a man with a most excellent CV and reputation, allowing this to be so tarnished by these London institutions that now bare his name?  He needs to know what sins are being perpetrated under his banner: we're sure it's not what he stands for.

Heralded as the best bar in London in Time Out magazine, Hix Bar was clearly somewhere we had to try. Having spotted the Hix neon sign through Soho’s clutter, the imposing and closed oak door left us wondering if they were in fact open for business today but pushing through, we found yes, they were, and passing the restaurant on the left, we headed down to ‘Mark’s’, the basement bar.

First, on the decor, this was a confused place, like a twenty something’s bedroom that has yet to clear the adolescent junk of the previous decade (a bar billiards table for example) while showing pretensions to sophistication (a scattering of deep recline leather sofas). Bad enough, but elsewhere, the Ikea stock of wooden back chairs gave the whole thing a factory canteen style air. While the chairs may have given it the flavour, the roster of staff eating at the bar put the flesh on the bones. True, it was 4:30 in the afternoon and the staff were no doubt snacking between the lunch and the dinner service but despite being the only paying customers in the bar, they couldn’t have been less interested in us than if we entered the bar wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan ‘we’ve got Herpes, kiss me’. Worse was to come.

After five to ten minutes of sitting there staring around the place playing with each other a game of ‘who’s the loudest member of staff’ versus ‘who’s the rudest’, someone finally came over to take our drinks order. Now, this is the place that claims to make a cocktail. As such, in a way that we might at a restaurant take the tasting menu or chef’s recommendation, we invited them to give us the best of the cocktails, what’s the house speciality, what does the barman ‘own’? Your choice we said, give us the best the house has to offer. We we’re met with the bland reply, ‘90% of the cocktail list is our speciality’. Should we leave now?

We asked for something in the sour family, open to whatever base spirit; our waiter seemed slightly lost though suggested a gin with lemon twist and when pushed for a second drink, a rum based cocktail. Knock us out.

When we were at the Connaught Bar (see our previous post), Erik made us two incredible cocktails when we said surprise us; he did, we sat, we drank; in short, we were in awe. Here alas, we were only in awe of how bad their ‘speciality’ was. Both cocktails suffered from an extreme degree, indeed eye watering degree, of sourness; neither had any sense of balance at all. Wrong, wrong, wrong. And in the time spent there, I never saw the bar tender tasting the output even once. The gin/lemon cocktail was like a sour highball lemonade and the rum base was little more than a neighbour’s BBQ rum punch with lemon and bitters; both were totally one dimensional.

We asked for the bill and left with three quarters of each cocktail still sitting in the glass. The ‘shocking’ thing is, given the choice between paying for a single cocktail at full price at the Connaught Bar or having five free cocktails at Hix, the Connaught wins every time, life’s too short to waste on inconsequential drinking; if I’m going to die of cirrhosis of the liver, I want it to count and at Hix, it simply doesn’t.

The world of real cocktail bars seems so often to try to make the client feel small or marginalised. Milk & Honey for example is so so trendy that they don’t even have their name over the door and as they say on their website ‘Access to non-members is by reservation only until 11pm (and in practice restricted to the early part of the week)’. Could they be any more up their own backside?

It is so refreshing therefore to find a bar like The Connaught Bar where not only are the best cocktails in the world made everyday but where Head Mixologist Agostino Perrone and his team treated us even on our first visit there as if we were long standing friends and cherished customers. In short, they completely won us over.

What’s more, while our casual use of the phrase ‘the best cocktails in the world’ in the last paragraph was, well, casual, there is in fact more truth than hyperbole in that statement because Senior Mixologist there Erik Lorincz this July won the Diageo Reserve World Class Bartender of the Year 2010 award. In short, he’s a world champ cocktail maker who beat a global field of 9,000 mixologists to take the title.

With such pedigree, the bar will of course do the classics if you want them but so much more fun is to let them decide your drink for you. We had two of Erik’s competition winning cocktails including Reach for the Sky and a Green Lady. Now, these drinks are a long way away from vodka, cranberry, triple sec and lime, rather, these are really clever drinks with extensive use of herbs and botanicals and other ingredients that are totally original in drink construction. The Green Lady for example comprises Green Tea infused Tanqueray Ten, lemon juice, lime juice, rosemary sugar, green Chartreuse and egg white, shaken and double strained and garnished with a shiso leaf and dry lemon. It looked beautiful and tasted beautiful and in my sheer excitement, I had already drank half the glass before it occurred to me to take a picture. The photo of my half empty glass does it little justice so I wont disrespect them by posting it here but I’ll collect another picture next time.

The Martinis too are imprinted with their own twist on the taste with original bitter infusions and in theatre with a Martini trolley that’s wheeled to your table so that you're ringside for the show. Agostino mixes the drink right there in front of you after you have chosen which of the bitter infusions you might enjoy for a new twist on a classic. Bitters here include vanilla, grapefruit, cardamom, liquorice, lavender, ginger or coriander. I chose liquorice and it was delightful.

All the cocktails served had just the right balance between sweet and sour and fruit/flavour and alcohol and all were a visual treat.The herb backing in many imparted hitherto unknown drinking flavours that you just have to try for yourself if want something properly original. Cocktail legend Dale DeGroff (of Rainbow Room fame) who was a judge at the Bartender of the Year competition said of the event that ‘these 21st century bartenders are the pioneers of a new golden age of the craft’; given that Erik won, I guess that makes him THE pioneer and drinking at The Connaught Bar therefore opens up a new frontier of cocktail drinking. There's so few places that could ever offer that.

To drink drinks of this quality, it might be worth having to make a reservation, it might be worth having to queue behind a red rope manned by surly door attendants, it might even be worth joining a private members club that doesn’t have a name above the door. Instead though, at The Connaught Bar, you have to do none of this, turning up is enough; from the moment you step through the door, Agostino and his team with a natural warmth will make you feel special from the very start. And even more guaranteed, after a few Tanqueray Ten Martinis, you’ll feel more than just special by the time you get up to leave a few hours later. We had the best time there and will certainly go back in the very near future.

Second wines continue to be where it’s at in the CC household with a 1990 Carruades de Lafite representing the Rothschilds yesterday and a 1996 Pavillon Rouge fronting for Chateau Margaux today. Both I should say up front were great drinking, but while it was the Carruades de Lafite that was the better wine of the two, that's not the same as being the best value. Like the grand vin, even the Carruades de Lafite is now stratospherically expensive making the idea of value a vexing question. Let’s taste first before we attempt to answer.

First to the Carruades de Lafite, it was exquisite. In the first place, 1990 was a good vintage overall with Michael Broadbent rating the year as a 5 star vintage – a promising start then. With 20 years of bottle age, the wine is now ripe for drinking with the tannins having mellowed into the background allowing the fruit flavours to fully come through. A good nose of blackcurrant, mocha and a touch of pepper follow through on the palate but what is most impressive is the complexity and the depth of flavour. The wine keeps on giving in the mouth and the finish too and really points to the idea that this, despite being a second wine, outclasses almost anything else bottled helping the amateur drinker (like us) understand what quality really means and helps demonstrate what a truly great claret should taste like. Certainly this wine is better than other rated growths (including we think the super seconds) and gives many first growths a good run for the money. 

Therein of course lies the problem, quality always costs and the Lafite name is now the benchmark for quality and price of the 1855 classifications. We were lucky to pick up the Carruades de Lafite during the recession giving us a relatively ‘cheap’ case. With the market having now recovered, the 1990 is currently retailing at over £300 a bottle! By comparison, the Lafite grand vin is now a budget busting £700+ a bottle but get this, Mouton Rothschild 1990 retails at around £250. In other words, the Carruades is now trading at first growth prices and is more expensive than cousin Mouton on a like for like basis. The conclusion then is the quality is undeniably there but this is no bargain (but damn it’s good).

With the Pavillon Rouge (1996), you just have to get excited. Of the grand vin Chateau Margaux, Robert Parker describes it as ‘a modern day legend’ and goes on to say that the 1996 vintage of Margaux ‘continues to give every indication of being one of the all time great clarets’. Rated 98-100 Parker points, Chateau Margaux carries a price tag of £500+ so is out the range of most. But in the year when the grand vin is so good, the second wine must surely follow n’est-ce-pas? What’s more, the Pavillon Rouge retails at around £80 a bottle so is somewhat more affordable. Writing this, I still have a glass of it in front of me and it is delightful. A couple of hours after opening the nose is still quite closed and being 6 years younger than the Lafite, modest tannins are still present but the overwhelming sensation that you’ll get on this wine is the big fruit flavours in the mouth, the blackcurrants, blackberries and raspberries. Parker describes the grand vin as ‘massive, but not heavy’, and so it is with the Pavillon - massive. It’s an utter joy to drink.

So which is it, the Carruades de Lafite 1990 or the Pavillon Rouge 1996? As always it depends (and not least on your budget). The Lafite is out of the range of most and perhaps needs to be rated versus the other first growth wines given its price point which is quite remarkable. As for the Pavillon Rouge, it’s not as complex as the Lafite and the finish is good but not as extensive (in this sense it is typical of a second wine), but this is a serious fun wine or a fun serious wine whichever way you like. The Lafite meanwhile is a serious serious wine. Both are great but money has to be a consideration. We might if a good deal comes along stock up on Pavillon Rouge and anticipate the joy of drinking but sadly, when the current case of Carruades de Lafite is exhausted, we’ll have to move on and merely relish the memories. But oh happy memories, oh happy drinking.