Nik and opposite number Mark from Macworld at the Ice Bar

First week back is always busy. It’s Friday already and only now am I getting to the end of the pile of email that needed to be read and answered. It was also press week.

So, it was nice that there were two excuses to go out, and particularly that Wednesday’s party was somewhere I’d not been before: the Ice Bar. It’s a strange place at the southern end of Regent Street, kept permanently 5 degrees below zero so that the ice from which it’s made doesn’t melt. You can feel the cold in your lungs.

It’s as well they gave us big silvery capes to wear as it was one of the hottest days of the year, so a lot of us had come to work in shorts (and some in sandals, mercifully without socks), which was probably unwise when we all knew where we were going to end up. Needless to say, nobody sat on the ice-sculpted stools, although everyone, at some point, cracked the obvious ‘how embarrassing; we’ve turned up in the same silver outfit’ joke.

What I don’t understand, though, is why we didn’t stick to the glasses. Like everything else in there, they were made from crystal clear ice, drawn from the Torne river, 200km north of the Arctic Circle, yet they didn’t freeze to your lips as they slowly melted in your hand. Perhaps it was the purity of the ice, which was strange stuff to touch. The tables had a slightly gummy finish to them where they’d been rubbed smooth by the thousands of fingers that had swept across them, and weren’t white and frosty like an ice cube.

A bigger mystery, though, is how they get away with having furry-hatted people working in there when the whole point of it is that it’s so cold; well below the regulations for working environments.

Would I pay to go there? I’m not convinced. It would be £12 to get in for 45 minutes, with one drink thrown in for that price and all subsequent drinks £6 a pop, which is a lot - even by London prices. It was fun, though, and perhaps somewhere to take a naive out-of-townie to give them a thrill.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 28th, 2006 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Journal, London, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.