Knit one Purl two

I love a good cocktail. Throw in quirky or beguiling environs, brilliant company and a small gas burner for distilling your drink and you have, by my count, a winning evening.

On Friday night we went to Purl for Nina’s birthday. A little hideaway in Sherlock Holmes territory, off Baker Street, Purl is a basement bar celebrating libations of London olde – but with a multisensory twist. I concede there is a risk that any bar promoting the use of “aroma, fogs, airs, foams, food, bespoke serviceware and liquid nitrogen to bring the drink to life and transport the guest to another place or time” could be more wanky than wonderful but Purl is truly a class act.

Perhaps it’s the non-Shoreditch locale, maybe it’s the table service, or perhaps it’s the gentle humour of the menu, whatever the case, we had a really, really lovely night.

My first drink was something called a Moch Distiller. On the menu it’s bracketed as (warm).  It tastes like a sweet dream under a warm blanket on a cold night. The ingredients – Pamperol Especial, agave nectar, pimento, orange and vanilla tea are distilled in a stove top coffee pot over a small gas burner which is then poured over a cube of perfectly formed white chocolate and raspberry sugar. If only chemistry had been this exciting at high school I might have been more inclined to study.

Between the seven of us, at two drinks apiece, we made our way through most of the creations on the menu, which came variously as a science experiment replete with pipettes, as a takeaway meal and as an old man’s flask-in-a-paper-bag.

We had a nook all to ourselves, which made for civilised, audible conversation, and at 11pm we were all ready to go home. Happily cocktailed, Christmas plans locked in (lunch at ours with menus and cocktails tbc) and a brief, efficient walk to the tube, robed in layers of wool and coat.

Even Lovely Boy, who isn’t mad for cocktails, even less so when it involves leaving the house on a cold night, had a great time with his detonated lemon twist cocktail.

As far as my London cocktailing experiences go, this one would be up there.