Best for...a potentially bad date

Picture it. You’ve been set up – stitched up like a kipper – by that friend who insists on playing matchmaker. “I know someone you’d just love,” they say, about a different eligible singleton each week: a rotating menu where nothing is appetizing and you’d rather just eat takeaway alone.

Metaphors aside, you’re going out to dinner and you’d rather not be. My advice – go to Inamo, in Soho. It’s built on talking points.

The lighting
It’s dark and sort of mysterious of an evening.

The food
Friends had been telling me for ages to try the pork neck, which comes with a spicy chocolate sauce, and the black cod main. I'm glad I listened to them. 

The menu
At Inamo you don’t get a menu handed to you. It’s projected on to the table. And you get to frantically click away at it and see pictures of all the dishes appear on a plate in front of you. (The plate is also projected.) That in itself can provide a whole evening’s worth of chatter. If it doesn’t, well you can play Battleships on the table. And if the date is a complete dud, you can even order a taxi.

But all in all, you should have enough entertainment to make every moment of silence more golden than awkward.

5 places to make up with gin

Gin and I have a fraught relationship. The on-again-off-again sort. But when we make up, oh what a sweet reunion.  

London itself has had some tempestuous times with gin. From the rabid push at temperance shown in Hogarth’s Gin Lane lithographs to the glory-days of London’s gin palaces — their closure, and now their second coming.

What better place to reconcile? What better time than now?

My five spots for a make-up session:

1. You’ll forget yourself, the time, the year even, when you walk into Marylebone’s Purl. It’s modelled on a Victorian gin palace, and slings an unmissably odd, eponymous cocktail.

2. you prefer your old-world-charm served with a touch of class? (A touch that don’t come cheap.) Soak up the Hendrick’s Gin Cocktail Afternoon Tea at Green Park’s Berry Bar.

3. For a more modern take, head to Graphic, in the heart of Soho ad-land, with its enormous and colourful selection of brands.

4.  214 Bermondsey wields mystery well, and a cocktail shaker better. Enough to help you make nice with your old frenemy, gin? Perhaps.

5. Like 214 Bermondsey, 69 Colebrooke Row is too cool for a name. An address is all they need. Well, that and the damn fine gin. Their master classes also look worth a shot. 

By James McKnight