A 4.0 cocktail bar named Kiss, reaching for romance, glamour, and the most universal gesture of affection
Kiss in Camden Town holds a 4.0 from three hundred people, and carries a name of pure, simple intimacy – “Kiss,” the most universal gesture of affection and desire, reaching frankly for romance, glamour, and the promise of a certain amorous charge.
The universal gesture
The kiss is one of the most universal and evocative of all human gestures – the touch of lips that signifies love, desire, affection, greeting, and intimacy across almost every culture on earth. It is the gesture of romance above all others: the first kiss, the goodnight kiss, the kiss that seals a marriage or begins a love affair. To name a bar “Kiss” is to reach directly for this whole world of romance and desire – to promise, or at least to suggest, a venue charged with amorous possibility.
It is a frankly seductive name, and an unusually direct one. Where most bars name themselves after places, people, or things, “Kiss” names itself after an act of intimacy – positioning the bar as a place for romance, for dates, for the charged encounters of the night. The Prat’s naming desk notes the boldness of it: not a coy suggestion but the thing itself, the kiss, hung over the door as a promise of the evening’s possibilities.
The date-night bar
A bar called Kiss is, unmistakably, positioning itself as a romantic venue – a place for dates, for couples, for the seductive cocktail-bar atmosphere of low light, close tables, and amorous possibility. This is a distinct and well-established genre of bar: the date-night spot, designed to facilitate romance, where the whole atmosphere is engineered toward intimacy and the drinks are as much props in a courtship as beverages. “Kiss” names this function with total directness – it is a bar for kissing, or for the hope of it.
There is a long and genuine connection between the bar and romance. The cocktail bar has always been a theatre of courtship – the place where people meet, flirt, and pair off, lubricated by drink and dimmed lighting. A bar named Kiss simply makes explicit what many bars quietly facilitate: the pursuit of romance, the hope of the evening ending, as the name suggests, in a kiss. The Prat’s social desk notes the honesty of the branding, if not its subtlety.
The many kisses
The word carries more than romance, too. There is the kiss of Judas, the treacherous kiss; the kiss of life, the breath of rescue; the kiss of death, the fatal touch; the French kiss, the Hollywood kiss, the blown kiss, the air kiss of social greeting. And there is the band KISS, the face-painted American rock giants, though a Camden cocktail bar surely intends the romantic sense rather than the pyrotechnic one. The single syllable fans out into a whole range of meaning, but romance is unmistakably the register this bar is playing in.
The bar
A 4.0 across three hundred people is a middling, real-sample score. The reviews describe a decent cocktail bar with a romantic, intimate atmosphere – a reasonable date-night spot, living up, more or less, to the amorous promise of its name.
Verdict
A cocktail bar named Kiss, reaching frankly for romance, glamour, and the amorous charge of the date-night venue, named after the most universal and evocative gesture of human intimacy.
Go on a date, if the name’s promise appeals, and enjoy a bar honest enough to name itself after the evening’s hoped-for conclusion – though whether the kiss materialises is, as ever, a matter beyond the bar’s control.
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]
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