Nightlife
Originally published on Tuesday, 7th December 2010
The French Are Invading!
ECC: Exceedingly Crafty Cocktails
Not wishing to sound like my grandmother, but what have the French ever done for us? Aside from Chanel, that is. Oh and Bardot. Maybe Piaf, berets, Tefal and Sartre. Cognac and Champagne are pretty good. Include Paris’s Experimental Cocktail Club on the list and even my grandmother might have to rethink her quaint xenophobia. Bless her tipple-loving socks.
For the last few years, our trips to Paris have regularly centred around retail top-ups at Colette followed swiftly by several drams at one of the various quirky drink dispensaries from Pierre-Charles, Olivier and Romée – the charming chaps behind the ECC, Curio Parlor and Le Prescription.
And finally, finally they’ve deigned to invade, ahem, ‘export’ to our humble little island.
Setting up shop on the site of the old Clinic/Thirteen (now there’s a blast from the past), the new ECC Chinatown is two floors of 3am-licensed, speakeasy-deco-meets-colonial fabulousness. The drinks list is old-school and absolutely spot-on, and the space has all the quirky details (in-built piano-bar, mirrored ceiling) you’d expect from the ECC gents and their ever-stylish new partner, Hendrick’s Gin’s Xav Padovani.
With hostess-on-the-door, Pinky, hot on the crowd case (so behave), we now have somewhere fabulous to drink in town when those early hours roll in – without yielding to another members’ club, that is. Or Paris.
Info
Experimental Cocktail Club 13 Gerrard Street, W1D 5PS
