Just recently I spent quite a few weeks living in a hotel in Los Angeles called the Biltmore. It's a grand old dowager of a place, with a surfeit of wood panelling, many shiny chandeliers and a classic American cocktail bar, overseen by a man called Greg who mixes a mean sidecar and who, as a result, is in danger of becoming my family.
Naturally, in my solo state, my thoughts turned to only one thing. No, not that. I'm talking about what makes for a really good free bar snack.
At the Biltmore it's a bowl of nuts. But not just any nuts. Oh no. The constantly refilled stainless steel bowls are rammed with cashews, macadamias, shelled pistachios, hazelnuts and brazils. As with almost every mixed bar snack there is something that always gets left uneaten, which in this case is the brazils. Coated in a thick layer of chocolate they are fine, but salted? No, not really.
Still, the nuts serve their purpose. They are fiercely salty (my nightly sessions propping up the counter did thoroughly impressive things to my blood pressure) which in turn makes you thirsty, which makes you buy more drinks, which gets you drunk, which makes you peckish, which in turn makes you think even the brazils are worth a pop and so it goes. These salted nuts are sufficiently moreish to keep you coming back.
Thinking far too deeply about this, I concluded that the perfect bar snack really shouldn't be too edible. At Richard Corrigan's fish restaurant they serve their own homemade crisps, delivered still warm from the kitchen.
Disastrous. They are just too good. An hour at the bar with a constantly refilled bowl of those and you won't even need dinner.
There is even one step up from that, however, the crack cocaine of bar snacks, and that's products of the pig. By which I mean the skin. At the fiercely expensive Scott's on Mount Street in Mayfair they serve olives,
peanuts and - God help me - pork scratchings. Once upon a time at Rules on Maiden Lane - we're talking years ago - they would use up all the bacon rinds from the kitchen by frying them and offering them in crisp shards at the bar. Oy vey, as no one has ever said about crisp bacon fat.
At the other end of the spectrum of course (and for these you have to loiter at one of those American airport bars, where ambition goes to die) is the bowl of tiny overbaked pretzels. Does anybody actually like them? I mean, really like them? Surely not. They do look reasonably promising with their shiny, varnished shells. But a few mouthfuls later and it's all disappointment and regret and sawdust.
For the most part though, bar snacks are a middling mixture, a reasonable haul of spiced or honey roasted nuts, which you genuinely do want to eat, mixed in with baked wheatey somethings that you don't. What begins as a quick pick, pick, pick at the bowl soon becomes an excavation process, as you fumble through the pile of unappetising stuff in search of the ones you genuinely want. Which, weirdly, serves its own process, for there is nothing the solo traveller needs more than a way of looking casually occupied, and the unbalanced cocktail bar snack provides exactly that.
And so now you have a mental image of me, in downtown LA, a sidecar to the bad, fumbling through a bowl of nuts in search of friendship. And frankly you wouldn't be far wrong. I really did need to come home.
The question, however, remains. What makes a top bar snack, and where can you find them? Or conversely, like the disappointing pretzel, which fail to deliver? We need to know.
