LUNCHEON
NO. 5
SS 2018
LIQUID LUNCH
by Josefine Skomars
If you know where to look, in a cul-de-sac courtyard behind St James’s Palace in London, you’ll find the charming cocktail bar Dukes. It is in these small rooms that Ian Fleming is said to have smoked cigarettes and found inspiration for his James Bond novels. Over the years, many others have developed a taste for the heady cocktails and intimate atmosphere of this hotel bar, but as Alessandro Palazzi, its head bartender, says: what happens at Dukes stays at Dukes.
I meet Alessandro just after lunch, to catch him before the bar fills with afternoon guests all hoping for a table and a laugh with the bartenders. Before we settle in the armchairs at the corner table, Alessandro wheels out the martini trolley and talks me through the making of my Vesper Martini. There’s no need to keep an eye on the clock, whether it be lunchtime or dinnertime, 1908 or 2018 outside: inside Dukes, time is not important. The light is dimmed, the cocktail is cold and the conversation flows freely among the guests, the bartenders and with Alessandro Palazzi.
Photographs by John Balsom
by Josefine Skomars
If you know where to look, in a cul-de-sac courtyard behind St James’s Palace in London, you’ll find the charming cocktail bar Dukes. It is in these small rooms that Ian Fleming is said to have smoked cigarettes and found inspiration for his James Bond novels. Over the years, many others have developed a taste for the heady cocktails and intimate atmosphere of this hotel bar, but as Alessandro Palazzi, its head bartender, says: what happens at Dukes stays at Dukes.
I meet Alessandro just after lunch, to catch him before the bar fills with afternoon guests all hoping for a table and a laugh with the bartenders. Before we settle in the armchairs at the corner table, Alessandro wheels out the martini trolley and talks me through the making of my Vesper Martini. There’s no need to keep an eye on the clock, whether it be lunchtime or dinnertime, 1908 or 2018 outside: inside Dukes, time is not important. The light is dimmed, the cocktail is cold and the conversation flows freely among the guests, the bartenders and with Alessandro Palazzi.
Photographs by John Balsom