A sudden increase in temperature, a spluttering cough and a shortness of breath. For a fleeting moment, I thought I’d caught this horrible virus until I realised it was simply my body reacting to the cost of lunch at Gin & Juice.
We had only popped into this new Park Street gin bar for a quick lunchtime snack without booze so I assumed the £15 cash in my pocket would easily cover a couple of sandwiches and juices. After all, this is Park Street BS1, not Park Lane W1.
And so a bill of £27.50 for two bagels and two juices was certainly enough to bring a tear to the eye and a sudden scramble for the debit card.
On the site of what for years was a jewellers and upmarket pawnbrokers, Gin & Juice is a collaboration between Cardiff clothes shop entrepreneur Steve Barker and Julian Dunkerton, the founder of the Superdry clothing brand and the Lucky Onion Group, which owns several hotels and pubs in the Cotswolds.
Although the Grade II-listed site already benefited from a striking frontage complete with marble columns, considerable money has clearly been spent on transforming the interior into the swanky bar it is now.
With its antique soda syphons, vintage glassware and trailing foilage, it’s an elegant venue set across two floors and certainly more of a nocturnal haunt than daytime hangout.
The double-height ceiling in the ground-floor bar is covered with framed photos of cultural icons from the past 50 years - everybody from George Best and Cary Grant to Sid Vicious and Debbie Harry - and, of course, it’s all very Instagrammable. The perfect place to pout for a selfie with your bestie.
Although many of the standard drinks are competitively priced against other high-end cocktail bars in the city, it’s also clearly aimed more towards drinkers flash enough - or stupid enough - to pay considerable premiums for some of the 450 gins on offer.
Specials this month include the Kuro Cherry Blossom, which will set you back £15.40 for a 50ml shot (add £2.80 for the recommended mixer).
And then there’s the Truffle Gin, which comes in at a cool £20.80 for a down-in-one 50ml measure before the £2.50 mixer. Apparently the best accompaniment is a rosemary and black olive tonic.
Call me old-fashioned but I want my gin and tonic to taste like gin and tonic rather than a pizza.
Still, it’s good to see half a dozen local gins on offer including Bristol Dry Turbo Island (at a head-spinning 75% ABV) and Psychopomp Old Tom.
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The food served from lunchtime until 4pm is essentially based around a range of bagels, although there is also a soup of the day with sourdough for an ambitious £7 and a couple of sharing boards including charcuterie and cheese.
For the vegans, there are two bagels on offer - ‘eggless mayo’ with tofu, vegan mayonnaise, chives, spring onion, tomato and rocket (£7) or BBQ pulled jackfruit with rocket, spinach, tomato and sun-dried tomatoes (£6.50).
We tried the pastrami and Swiss cheese with mustard, mayonnaise and gherkins (£7) and the smoked salmon and cream cheese with cucumber and red onion (£8.50).
They were both fine in that they contained all the listed ingredients within their warm, chewy bagels (although the smoked salmon one had spring onion rather than the advertised red onion) but they were smaller and almost twice the price of similar bagels bought from supermarkets or sandwich shops like Pret a Manger.
I had popped into Gin & Juice for a quick Negroni a couple of nights before and the cocktail was, inexplicably, topped with a cluster of colourful edible flowers.
It’s a naff theme that seemingly extends to most drinks and even the food as both our bagels and juices were garnished with yet more colourful petals.
We both went for Vitamin C Bodyguard juice, an expensive drink at £6 for an ice-less, foamy blend of clementine, grapefruit, pineapple, lime and rosehip that really didn’t taste of anything much other than orange juice.
‘Why did it take them 15 minutes to make a juice?’ asked my daughter, scanning the empty bar on Saturday lunchtime.
‘I can only guess they were looking for the flowers in the fridge.’
‘Or maybe they were picking them around the corner on Brandon Hill,’ replied the 12-year-old.
THE VERDICT:
The food may not be worth a detour but Gin & Juice is all about what’s in your glass. Some will see it as a pricey, style-above-substance bar for the Instagram generation, but there will also be a lot of people who love the place because of that. The rest of us will simply have to gin and bear it.
RATINGS:
Overall: 3
Food: 3 (but 5 for range of gins)
Service: 3
Ambience: 4
Value: 2
Gin & Juice, 47 Park Street, Bristol, BS1 5NL.
