Posts by author
Julian de Féral
Julian de Feral wants you not to go to Original Sin. Okay? *tappy nose thing* Don’t go to Original Sin if you think a good drink is made good by precariously attaching an elaborately crimped zest fashioned in the shape of a hummingbird on to a burning lavender sprig with a mini-peg and served…
Taj 51 Buckingham Gate Suites and Residences is an emblem of a great Victorian past that still offers the very best in contemporary pampering. Julian de Feral is amused.
A century ago, had you walked into a bar and simply asked for an Old Fashioned, quite likely you’d have been answered with an inquisitive raise of the handlebar ‘tache. The very name of the cocktail we all know and recognise as the go-to tipple for serious whisky cocktail imbibers was purely an instruction for…
Style. A good thing right? Stylish people, stylish things, stylish places, stylish magazine. In his mesmerising ‘lost’ 1971 interview, Bruce Lee says “I do not believe in styles anymore: because of styles people are separated. They are not united together because styles became law.” Granted, he was talking about style in the context of Jeet…
Three hundred years ago in the City of London, people were mostly drunk. By some accounts as many as one in three houses had a still, producing some pretty nasty gin to satiate the average Londoner’s 14 gallon – yes, you read right. Yes, that includes women and children – a year habit. Nowadays one…
Ruby Murray, the Northern Irish popular singer who gave her name to rhyming slang’s favourite cuisine, was herself a big drinker. But probably not this classy. ‘A journey along the Grand Trunk Road is a bewildering mix of the past and present, tripping back and forth between the mundane and the momentous,’ writes Tim Smith…
On a blustery Sunday that looked almost mild enough to ditch the coat but windy enough to blow the change out of your pocket, I braved the in-between season to venture into the haven of the Four Seasons hotel, where a warm welcome was all that was needed to shake off the chill. Outside, the…
Ten quid. What’ll it buy you? A starter in an OK restaurant. A decent martini. One day’s congestion charge in London. A 72-inch inflatable shark. Back in 1824, it would buy you a license from London to distil Scotch whisky, so a Mr George Smith decided to skip his average starter, forgo any inflatables and become…
Having inhaled the estery fumes of practically every still house for each category of spirit several times over, I was surprised to realise that I had never once passed the threshold of a Scottish distillery, despite their relative proximity to myself in person as well a having somewhat of a soft spot for the spirit in question. As a…
Note that the pun “Shoot Tequila” was not chosen as the headline for this article on tequila. And for good reason. Please trust your bar person. These chaps and lasses spend most of their waking hours around alcohol, so unless you have the (thankfully, increasingly slim) misfortune to be served by an obtuse ‘tender, they’ll…