Crystal means clarity, light and luxury – from cut glass to champagne to the palace that gave a suburb its name
Crystal Bar holds a 4.0 from just four reviews – a sample far too small to judge – but the name is worth exploring, because “crystal” is one of the more loaded and glamorous words a bar can choose.
The word for clarity and light
“Crystal” carries a rich bundle of associations, nearly all of them positive and luxurious. There is crystal glass – the fine, heavy, cut lead glass of the best decanters, glasses and chandeliers, sparkling and expensive. There is rock crystal, the clear quartz prized since antiquity. There is the idea of clarity itself – “crystal clear,” transparent, pure, flawless.
For a bar, all of these are flattering. Crystal glassware speaks of luxury and quality – the finest drinks served in the finest glass. Clarity speaks of purity and precision – a clean, well-made drink. Light and sparkle speak of glamour and celebration. It is a name that promises the high end, the sparkling, the refined.
The champagne connection
There is also, for the drinks world, a specific and glamorous crystal: Cristal, the prestige champagne created by Louis Roederer, famously first made for a Russian tsar who, the story goes, wanted his champagne in a clear crystal bottle so that no assassin could hide anything in it. Cristal became one of the most prestigious and expensive champagnes in the world, and a byword for luxury, later heavily associated with a certain kind of high-rolling celebration.
A bar called Crystal, in a drinks context, inevitably summons this association too – the glamour of the world’s most exclusive champagne, the pop of the cork, the conspicuous luxury. The word does a great deal of aspirational work in a single syllable and a half.
The palace, again
And, for this survey, “crystal” cannot help but recall the Crystal Palace – Joseph Paxton’s great glass building for the 1851 Great Exhibition, which we have met repeatedly in these Chelsea articles. The building that dazzled the world, gave a South London suburb its name, and burned down in 1936. “Crystal” is a word woven through the history of this very part of London, from the palace to the museums it funded.
The four reviews
Four reviews is, as we have said of every such venue in this survey, statistically nothing – a 4.0 across four people tells you only that four people had an opinion. The bar may be excellent or ordinary; there is no way to know. What it has, at least, is a name rich in glamour and association, which is more than many better-reviewed venues can claim.
Verdict
Impossible to judge on four reviews, but named with a word that sparkles – clarity, cut glass, champagne, and the ghost of a glass palace.
The making of crystal glass
The “crystal” in fine glassware has a specific and rather surprising history. What makes lead crystal sparkle and ring is the addition of lead oxide to the glass, a technique perfected in England in the seventeenth century by a glassmaker named George Ravenscroft. The lead gives the glass its weight, its brilliance, its clarity, and the distinctive musical ring when struck.
So the glamorous “crystal” of the finest decanters and glasses is, chemically, leaded glass – beautiful, brilliant, and containing the same heavy metal that, in other contexts, is a poison. There is a small irony in the fact that the most prized and luxurious drinking vessels ever made owe their beauty to lead, the same substance whose mining gave the Welsh village of Halkyn its industry. Crystal and lead, glamour and poison, are the same thing seen from different angles – which is, perhaps, a fitting thought for a bar.
Verdict
Impossible to judge on four reviews, but named with a word that sparkles – clarity, cut glass, champagne, and the ghost of a glass palace.
Go, become the fifth, and drink something clear and sparkling in a bar named for the most glamorous form of glass.
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]
