Nobody but the bartender was in the room when I arrived. There were more than a dozen oil lamps, small, one on each table, and a well-lit fire. It was empty because it was a drizzly Tuesday eve, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t feel a little like a seance. I was there to communicate with spirits.
These spirits were not the ghosts of wars past but libations in classical forms. The Library cocktail bar occupies the top floor of The Hero in Maida Vale, named after a British general who won the Battle of Maida, Italy, in 1806.
Most will know of the ground-floor pub, which is always busy with beautiful people eating beautiful Scotch eggs, in elegant surroundings of slowly ageing wood. Likewise the grill room on the first floor, a white tablecloth-adorned place serving the food of an upscale London pub, is popular too.
The Library, which is above this grill, is already a hit with locals, I’m told, but a newer addition. On Wednesdays, there’s live jazz and at the weekend a DJ at a set of decks that divide the room, behind which there is a cosier seating area with books and vinyl records. But it is not a listening bar — the music is left to the professionals.
The cocktail menu is perfectly pitched: no insufferable concoctions strewn with sugar and flimsy takes on woodruff and sorrel. Pub cocktails should be as they are at The Hero: a Negroni, a margarita, an espresso martini and the like. Keep it simple.
I had a margarita and it was sound. Then I asked for a daiquiri, checking if the barman could do it as a Hemingway. He could, and over it came: not bad, not bad at all. And then I started to wish that one of these new-age pubs existed near where I live, by the river in the City. Thankfully, one is coming: look out for the Knave of Clubs, the next cog in London’s changing pub machine.