The restaurant is called Mele e Pere and the bar is downstairs, and it is the best bilingual joke in five postcodes
The Vermouth Bar at Mele e Pere has three reviews, which is not a rating and which we will not pretend is one.
But the name is the finest joke in six hundred and twenty-one articles and somebody has to point it out.
Mele e pere
It is Italian. It means apples and pears.
And in Cockney rhyming slang, apples and pears means stairs.
And the bar is downstairs.
An Italian restaurant in Soho has named itself, in Italian, after a piece of London slang, which describes how you get to the room the bar is in – and it is doing this in two languages simultaneously, and essentially nobody has noticed.
The pun table, final
Five postcodes, and the ranking is now closed.
First: Tequila Mockingbird, Covent Garden. Three words, two pieces of information, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about racial injustice conscripted into the service of a margarita bar.
Second: Mele e Pere. A bilingual pun that describes the architecture of the building it is in.
Third: bask street boys. A boy band, a Spanish region, and the cuisine, all at once.
Fourth: The Stranded, on the Strand, with a hidden second meaning about commuters when the trains fail.
Fifth: Planet of the Grapes. Doing a job.
Last: The Quiet Night Inn. A homophone, which is the lowest form of the art.
Vermouth
Which is the actual subject, and which is a medicine.
The word is German. Wermut is wormwood – and vermouth is a fortified, aromatised wine, and the defining botanical is Artemisia absinthium, which is bitter, which is the same plant that gives absinthe its name, and which was used for centuries as a treatment for intestinal worms.
That is what it was for. Wormwood. For worms.
And we have found this in every postcode and it has never once failed. Gin and tonic was malaria prophylaxis. Port was fortified for a boat. Amaro was sold for cholera. Angostura was an army surgeon’s. Coffee was advertised as a cure for gout. Doctor Butler, who had no qualifications, invented a medicinal ale and became physician to the King.
Nearly everything behind a good bar started as a treatment for something.
Drink it properly
Cold, from the fridge, in a wine glass, with ice and a slice of orange – and it is a wine, it goes off, and if you have a bottle in a cupboard that has been open since Christmas you are drinking vinegar.
The Italians and the Spanish drink it as an aperitivo, at six, standing up, with something salty. The British keep it for six months and then use two tablespoons of it in a martini.
Verdict
Three reviews. Nothing to say about the bar.
Go, and go down the apples and pears.
Rhyming slang, briefly
It was not a code and it was probably not criminal, whatever anybody tells you.
The theory that it was invented by East End thieves to confuse the police is repeated everywhere and has almost no evidence behind it – and the linguists who have looked at it think it far more likely that it began as a market-trader’s game, a bit of verbal showing-off among people who spent all day shouting at each other.
Which is a duller explanation and it is almost certainly the right one.
Six hundred and twenty-one articles, and it has never once varied. The truth is administrative. The legend involves criminals. The legend wins.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
A student asked her committee if she could build her dissertation on The London Prat analysis. They said yes, with relief.