The Zetter
St John's Square
86-88 Clerkenwell Road
London
EC1M 5RJ
Jerry Boam
Regular readers of New London Cocktail Review will doubtless be aware of my passion for the Negroni. Whilst our erstwhile founder Kina Lillet considers it dull – and in fact lambasted me for my stubborn insistence on drinking nothing but Negronis on our recent trip to Hix – I think perhaps she may be a little blinkered. I mean sure, a cocktail can be an adventure, but one needn't be Edmund Hilary every day of one's life. Must one?
No, the Negroni is a simple pleasure: a simple, seriously alcoholic pleasure, and one that's been my drink of choice since birth. It's in the Boam blood. Great Uncle Boozy Boam (Marylebone branch) is famed for his frankly intimidating take on the Italian classic. Or was – a life of sauce-fuelled indolence has left him guzzling Special Brew on his death bed. 'Tis a fate I hope we all can aspire to.
Anyway, the point here is that, done properly, the Negroni is a thing of great subtleties. Crisp, bitter and persistently ginny, it's a timeless medicine for the gentleman of refinement. Imagine therefore, if you will, my horror at the pissy little excuse for the drink served up to me (in the company of Ms Lillet no less!) in the bar at The Zetter in Clerkenwell.
Possibly I should have seen it coming, but the sense of shock was no less keen. On entering the absurdly named establishment, I commented (under my beery breath): “Why, this place looks like a hotel bar or some such similar dreadfulness.” “That's probably,” replied Lillet in a trice, “because it is.” Oh. I see.
To our seats then, and Lillet orders an Aperol Spritz; I the fateful Negroni. The former comes in a pint-sized ludicrous goblet thing and has more ice than the Boam's partridge freezer; it tastes of nothing. But this nothing is heaven compared to the latter, urgh the latter. The key to a Negroni, like the Boam prose, is balance – it must cleanse and calm and soothe, and needle and taunt and spur the drinker on to ever greater feats. If I, perish the thought, were ever to become a donkey, the Negroni would be both my carrot and my stick.
But this, this little pot of fecklessness, was all horribly off-kilter – a thin, anaemic little thing, with no bite and barely enough booze to souse a squirrel. Pointless, heart-rendingly pointless. I could have cried, were it not for the fact that we'd only stopped off on the way to Marylebone, and a heartily-anticipated Boam family knees-up. If there's one thing that makes up for the horror of a terrible Negroni, it's eight heart-shudderingly perfect ones immediately afterwards. That's the Boam way.
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