A cocktail bar flying the name of a great classic drink – the gimlet, the sharp gin-and-lime of the Royal Navy and of Raymond Chandler’s detective
The Gimlet Bar carries a 4.5 across a tiny count of just two reviews. The Prat’s numbers desk notes at once that two reviews cannot be judged, and we make no claim on that figure. But the drink it is named for has one of the great stories in the whole cocktail canon, and there the Prat’s naming desk has plenty to say.
Towards Bermondsey and London Bridge
The Gimlet Bar sits towards Bermondsey and London Bridge, on the south-bank side, mixing cocktails for the district’s crowds. Proper Bermondsey-and-Southwark territory, no disclaimer needed.
The classic cocktail
The gimlet is one of the great classic cocktails – a sharp, clean, beautifully simple drink of gin and lime cordial, and little else. Its origins are famously naval: the Royal Navy issued lime juice to its sailors to ward off scurvy on long voyages, and the story goes that mixing that medicinal lime with the officers’ gin made the ration far more palatable – the gimlet born, so legend has it, as a way of taking one’s anti-scurvy medicine with a smile. It is sometimes said to be named for a naval surgeon, Sir Thomas Gimlette, and sometimes for the gimlet itself – the small, sharp boring tool – which suits the drink’s clean, penetrating sharpness perfectly.
Chandler’s drink
The Prat’s favourite thing is the gimlet’s place in literature. The drink is immortalised in Raymond Chandler’s great detective novel The Long Goodbye, where the private eye Philip Marlowe declares, with connoisseur’s precision, that a real gimlet is half gin and half lime juice “and nothing else.” That single line fixed the gimlet forever in the world of hard-boiled glamour – the cool, sharp, no-nonsense drink of the detective, sipped in dim bars over difficult conversations. To name a cocktail bar the Gimlet is to fly all that literary, noirish, classic-cocktail glamour.
The unjudgeable sample
The Prat holds firmly to its rule. Two reviews is no sample at all, and we make no claim whatever on that figure. But a bar named for so classic and storied a drink needs no large sample to justify its name – the gimlet carries the Royal Navy, the anti-scurvy lime, and Raymond Chandler’s detective in its two sharp ingredients. On the strength of that magnificent cocktail heritage, the Gimlet Bar earns its place in the record; the verdict on the bar itself, the Prat leaves to a larger crowd.
Verdict
With just two reviews, the Gimlet Bar carries no meaningful sample at all, and the Prat makes no claim on the figure. But it flies the name of a great classic cocktail – the gimlet, the sharp gin-and-lime of the Royal Navy’s anti-scurvy ration and of Raymond Chandler’s detective – one of the most storied drinks in the whole canon.
Go and form your own view of the bar, the sample being far too small for ours, but order a gimlet while you are there. Half gin, half lime, “and nothing else,” as Marlowe insisted – the sharp, clean, naval classic that a bar could scarcely choose a finer drink to be named for.
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]
