A 4.3 cocktail bar from 455 reviews at The Star, 171 Portobello Road, birthplace of Portobello Road Gin and the Ginstitute
Portobello Road Distillery at The Star holds a 4.3 from four hundred and fifty-five reviews, and is one of the most distinctive drinking spots in the district – a classic 19th-century Portobello Road pub that became the birthplace of an award-winning gin and a tiny gin museum, with the copper still working just upstairs.
The facts, first
Address: The Star, 171 Portobello Road, W11 2DY, near Notting Hill Gate and Ladbroke Grove tubes. The ground floor is a classic neighbourhood pub with an astonishing gin selection and expert bartenders; upstairs is “The Ginstitute,” an immersive gin museum and blending experience where guests learn gin’s history and distil their own bottle on a copper pot still. It is the original home of the award-winning Portobello Road No. 171 Gin, born here in 2011. The Prat’s listings desk states the essentials: a classic Portobello pub with an astonishing gin range, the birthplace of Portobello Road Gin, and a gin museum and distilling experience upstairs.
The gin born above the pub
The story is a fine one. In 2008, three friends and drinks-trade veterans – Jake Burger, Ged Feltham, and Paul Lane – took over the failing Portobello Star, a pub dating to 1836, opening (inauspiciously) on the very day Lehman Brothers collapsed. They turned it into one of London’s leading cocktail bars, and in the rooms above amassed a huge collection of gin history, opening “The Ginstitute” – a tiny museum of gin, one of the smallest in London – and, in 2011, creating their own gin to call it home: Portobello Road No. 171 Gin, named for the address, a nine-botanical London Dry that went on to win awards and national distribution. Gin made above a Portobello pub, now sold across the land. The Prat’s beverage desk relishes the tale: an award-winning gin born in the rooms above a failing Portobello pub, the Ginstitute and its copper still upstairs, gin history made real.
Gin, Notting Hill, and the great revival
There is a deep fitness in a gin distillery on Portobello Road, for gin is London’s own spirit – born of the notorious 18th-century “Gin Craze,” when cheap gin flooded the city (the “Mother’s Ruin” of Hogarth’s Gin Lane), and reborn in the 21st-century craft-gin revival that has swept Britain. The Ginstitute tells this whole colourful, often miserable history, from gin’s Dutch origins through the Craze to the modern boom – and makes it real with a working still. This survey has met London’s craft-drink revival throughout; Portobello Road Gin is one of its great success stories, and The Star its spiritual home. The Prat’s history desk notes the pedigree: gin, London’s own spirit, from the Gin Craze to the craft revival, its history told and its spirit distilled above a Portobello pub.
What the 455 reviews mean
A 4.3 across more than four hundred and fifty people is a strong, deeply volume-proof score. As this survey argues, a good score sustained across a substantial crowd is a trustworthy verdict, and a 4.3 across four hundred and fifty marks a genuinely good, well-run, distinctive venue. The Prat’s statistics desk files it as a strong large-sample score: a dependable, well-liked gin pub and distillery, its quality confirmed across a substantial crowd.
Verdict
Portobello Road Distillery at The Star is one of the district’s most distinctive spots – a classic Portobello pub with an astonishing gin range, the birthplace of an award-winning gin, and a gin museum and still upstairs – with a strong 4.3 from a substantial crowd. Gin history, made and drunk on Portobello Road.
Go for a gin from an astonishing collection at the classic pub where Portobello Road Gin was born, and, if the mood takes you, distil your own bottle upstairs at the Ginstitute – The Star, 171 Portobello Road, where London’s own spirit is celebrated, its colourful history told, and its craft revival made real above a Notting Hill pub.
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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