Sunday, September 29, 2013

Bar review: LONGITUDE 0°8' AT LE MÉRIDIEN (Piccadilly Circus)



Following the success that was two people being wined and dined, very well, for £29 on a deal I’d bought off LivingSocial, I developed a fondness for package deals off the internet, and thus bought another one, this time off Wowcher. 

The deal cost £17, which for “four cocktails and six canapés”, sounded too good to be true. Well, it was, in that it played very slyly on the fact that humans make assumptions. It was, quite literally, 4 cocktails, and 6 canapés. Not six plates, just six. I’d assumed that it would be six plates, but, as we all know, ASSUME makes an ASS of U and ME.



Fortunately, we’d had a big-ass lunch so even the smallest portions of canapés managed to feed us, and, whilst I skipped the ham sandwiches (I don’t like ham), the cheese and pesto bite was delicious. The cocktails, less so. They were all extremely strong. This is usually a trait I encourage in cocktails, as the ones they serve in Slug and Lettuce are usually entirely soft drink, with about ½ a shotglass worth of alcohol in it. 

Even I, being a big lightweight, would find it hard to get drunk on that. Yet they don’t taste bad at all, because of the lack of alcohol. The Longitude 0°8' cocktails went the opposite way – there was alcohol alright, but due to the lack of flavouring, fruits and sweetners, it pretty much felt like we were drinking pure vodka. Not pleasant.



I feel massively cheated by the fact that there were just six tiny little canapés, and not, as I’d dreamed in my head, six plates of them. But that’s slightly my problem, I should have looked at the £17 pricetag and realised not to be greedy. So the majority of my money went on the cocktails, then. But they were not good. 

Add in the fact that because Longitude 0°8' was an “upmarket” place and thus they can’t have their punters being too comfy, the sofas were rigid and unwelcoming. The woman who served us looked like she’d rather not be there. Oh, and the clientele were the biggest selection of hoity-toity goons I’d ever seen. (Then again, with an RRP of £14.50 for one of those disgusting cocktails, you’d have to have more money than sense to go here.) 

When it comes to pretention, this place would give Laduree a run for its money. Avoid.

Grade: F

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