🔶🟥🔵
(aka A Bar With Shapes For A Name) 232 Kingsland Rd, Whitmore Estate, London E2 8AX, United Kingdom
I take no pleasure in admitting it but I don’t like “art books.” I don’t place photography or painting or architecture books on my coffee table. Glossy mags on fashion and culture and personalities hold my attention for about as long as it would take to wait in line to buy one. I don’t get excited to hear Phaidon or Taschen has done another project with David Hockney to accompany another retrospective at the MET or is re-releasing something from Wolfgang Tillmans previously out of print. I have been to Dashwood twice. A published photographer friend of mine, who was once Miwa’s customer-of-the-day, once bragged to me how he had purchased a rare Daido Moriyama photo book from a schmuck at school for such a low price he liken it to theft. He informed me it could be flipped online for a healthy profit. This news was so uninteresting to me the only reason I’m able to remember it now is I filed it in my memory under “J***: the low down capitalist pig.” I have been to NY Art Book Fair several times but just for the people watching. I say this to all to ask: how was it I had such a lovely time at a bar which I can most simply describe as “walking into an art book about artsy bars.” The bar looks like an apartamento pop-up shop; the design elements compiled from Pinterest board clippings of De Stijl. It looks like the kind of place AirBnB would do a blog post about titled “Shoreditch Designer Bar Prescribes Cocktails by the Bottle;” despite the fact it’s not in Shoreditch. The bar is so “not me,” but perhaps 15 lefts make a right.
A Bar With Shapes For A Name is located at the southernmost edge of what is still probably considered Dalston. The shapes in question are some of the most popular ones: a triangle, a square, and a circle. These shapes are reproduced throughout the furnishings, decor, menu, and service elements. My first drink, a vodka milk punch, comes with a frozen block containing a shimmery prismatic cube. The triplet appears again as negative spaces in a fist of ice in something whiskey based. On a waist high mid century modern credenza is a slide projector throwing onto the wall a canary yellow triangle, a Golden Gate orange square, and a Byzantine violet circle. If you haven’t had an alcoholic milk punch before I suggest you click the above link and go find the nearest to your home; unless you live in London in which case go here. It tastes like your tongue is doing that trick of ripping out the tablecloth without disturbing the stemware atop, but as if the table cloth were made of otter fur.
My friend Owen and I are received at the front door by a host who assigns us seats. This is because their beverage delivery system, if not requiring it, lends itself to table service. At the front are high tops and stools for 2-6. The bars service areas in at the center left, a through passage at middle, and long couch backed with a length of mirror on the right. In the back are three long cafeteria tables that mimic a school lunchroom in miniature. Owen and I are sat on the couch, facing the bar, on either side of a circular platform supported by a rail snaking up the front bottom of the cushions. At the opposite end of the couch is Eric Andre. He didn’t do anything weird or nothing, he was just, like, on a date and though I’ve never met him in Brooklyn, as many of my friends and ex-girlfriends have, I always assumed I would one day, at Hotel Delmano or Achilles Heel, but not in London when I hadn’t even planned on being there in the first place.
Being at an assigned seat made me antsy as I am used to standing at the end of the bar between the bar back and the iPhone chargers. Owen and I kept getting up and walking around. We met years ago at Beverly’s Bar on Essex St when he was the visitor so he wanted to introduce me to everyone as this was his favorite neighborhood spot as Beverly’s was mine. He brought us here, on a Sunday night at 01:00 am, when it seems every other restaurant or bar worker has convened for one last weekend sip. We kept nearly missing our drinks being hand delivered to our seats, causing the server to fret over the lack of our compliance with how things are done here. A Bar With Shapes For A Name is a bit of a neighborhood in miniature. Each is patron is given their temporary residence address (Couch #3) and is welcome to visit their neighbor’s at theirs so long as they return to procure incidentals and manage the upkeep of their tabs. The drinks are all pre-batched and arrive in little capped glass bottles and jars; mixologically speaking this is their thing. The pre-made units of spirits in containers eliminates the risk of spillage and the appropriate glassware arrives either empty (if served up) or with ice onto which you are to pour said pre-concocted concoctions. They have beer as well, but not on tap. Logistically, the combination of these elements renders the bar counter itself rather unimportant: it needn’t be large to accommodate countless liquor bottles as most drinks are already made, nor does the civilian side possess many stools. The show is not happening behind the bar, the “show” happened earlier, in the daytime, in the basement, at a mixing station. The staff of bartenders, on the curiously busy Sunday night I visited, are therefore able to dart to and fro whenever the tab might take them like so many final mile subcontractors in their variously colored pastel coveralls (that’s the uniform).
Downstairs in the basement, the materials are more synthetic - aluminum and glass and black lacquered walls and industrial refrigerators. While upstairs there are handsome wooden shelves and little cutesy adornments like a futzy lamp or a little pot of flowers, the basement is more noir bringing to mind peering through Venetian blinds towards a dusky hairpin corner as an automobile passes, briefly striping your face with a tingle of frisson. The sort of place you aren’t seen rather caught. In the deep bottom back is a lab table with a bevy of scientific looking instruments: pipettes, mixing machines, beakers, tubing, automated shakers, measuring vessels, clipboard. I assume some sort of statistical analysis approximates how many martinis or negronis or vodka milk punches are to be ordered each night. I imagine James Bond walking up to a lab coat adorned drink chef to order the lychee martini - Agitated, not centrifuged.
Eventually it is time to smoke cigarettes. As we stand out front looking back into A Bar With Shapes For A Name I realize how small it looks from the street; especially so in a town known for its grand ol’ pubs. It is a bright little square cleaved between two businesses the dealings of which aren’t apparent afterhours. The bar is just out of place enough to suspect it may be invisible to those who aren’t the drinking type; shielded by some Diagonical hex. I couldn’t help but observe the pleasant aura of the night. Drinks were delivered with a smile, a bartender and I had a long conversation about milk punch, the guy took PayPal, and even Eric Andre’s date seemed to be going well. Just then appeared 8 of Owen’s coworkers and friends having just gotten off work at the elevated pub restaurant, called The Marksmen, where Owen is the private dining room manager. One of the drunker ones spots me from a few paces out, walks up to me and says “hey you’re an actor right?”
“Ah, I have acted.”
“Yeah. I recognize you from that one show.”
“I mean I suppose that’s technically possible.”
Is it though? I wonder.
A moment later a woman turned to us and said she thought Owen and I were very good looking and asked if we were a couple. I apologized and told her we were not and she was mildly heartbroken. It was slight, like as much as if I had eaten her leftovers, but had I known beforehand I could surely have planted one on Owen on account of how nice everyone was being it seemed wrong not to. The conviviality and assumptions of television credits admittedly buoyed my feeling about A Bar With… More than enough to garnish the hour and a half of alcoholic supplements, we had already imbibed, and spill over some glee to my new friends. We snuck down to make communion at the conference sized table in the basement and spent a couple hours getting to know each other over a game of Truth or Dare; a sort of seance of the still living. I guess in a bar decentralized, with no shaking behind it nor a DJ booth, you only have each other to look to.
As for the name, maybe the place does deserve to be purposefully different sounding. However if you type those three shape emojis into your maps app you certainly will not find A Bar With Shapes For A Name; so maybe this is really “A Bar With Shapes For A Name For A Name.” It rings better than “Pig & Whistle” or “McClusky’s & Arms” but it bears mentioning. A friend of mine the other day said he doesn’t go to any bar with an ampersand.
Edit: it has come to our attention the name of the establishment is derived from the book “The ABCs of 🔶🟥🔵: The Bauhaus and Design Theory” edited by Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller and published by Princeton Architectural Press, Inc. in 1991. So it was Bauhaus, not De Stijl, but I did warn you design compendiums aren’t within my purview.
Did you like this post? Does it make you want to buy me a drink for my next review? If so choose your favorite link below. Thanks, I owe ya one!
🍻