My 2 Pints
Well it’s sort of near Leicester Sq. It’s the closest tube anyway. Actually Verve is one of those places that no-one really knows where it is. Sure people have been, some people even go regularly, and dare to build it into an evening’s plans, but I’m pretty sure they’re fooling themselves.
For Verve is like that treasure cove thing in Pirates of the Caribbean (as I can’t remember the much cooler proper name of it), in that it cannot be found on any map. You have to just chance up on it one weird evening where you forget which way is up and which way is yellow. You won’t find it with that magic compass either (not the one from that shit Narnia-knock-off, but the Pirates again). You’ll find it in the day all right, walk past it three times just leaving your house to get a paper. But once night falls, and the doors open, it falls into another dimension entirely. The door to which will only open to revellers having induced a certain amount of alcohol.
Only once you’ve administered enough booze to make Withnail look like he’s at bible-camp… will you find this little gem.
This is probably not true. Although you’d be forgiven for assuming it was the case. I’ve never intended to go to Verve, but it’s not the kind of place you’d want to go. It’s a second choice place. You can’t get in somewhere else, too scruffy, too late, too male… whatever your problem, however drunk you are, Verve will take you. And they’ll call your shit ice cream whilst they do it too.
For if you were to plan a night here. It would never live up to expectations. Planned nights rarely do. The advantage of Verve, is that once your expectations have been ruined by refused entry into a good bar, you’ll turn to Verve as a last resort, imagining how shit it is in comparison, and how rubbish a time you’ll have. Once there, you’ll actually be surprised about how ‘not that shit afterall’ it is.
As I mentioned earlier, you can only find the place once you’ve stepped into Oliver Reed realms of intoxication, once in you’re straight in the bar area. There are steps up to balconies on a top level (handily the only way to get to the toilets is up these stairs), but hardly anyone is up there. The bar is all right. Bit too loud to talk, but a bit too tight to dance, so not up to much really, the clientele are pretty much all either city boy wankshafts, or horrendously cartoon caricature-like whores. Such tedious suicide-inspiring sacks of bullshit, you need to be ‘unable to see the exit’ drunk in order to stay more than 10 minutes.
But come around 11… or 12... At some point they open the downstairs club. Now this is much more like it. Suddenly the point of the place becomes clear. The games we were playing upstairs with all the inbred(in a zoo)s, were just to weed half the people. Find out who was actually almost dead from alcohol poisoning and who was just pretending. If you actually make it downstairs without being carried out in a stretcher beforehand, it’s pretty great down there. All the city boys, have turned into all right guys, willing to talk about other things than how much money they make. The whores, well they’re still whores, and they’ll still perform some incredibly dirty and surely indecent for public viewing dance moves on you, but even they somehow seem classier. Everyone’s a lot more friendly, and they’re al just having a good time.
Either that, or you’ll imagine you’re running around shaking hands, dancing and laughing with people. Yet in reality you’re running into people, knocking their drinks over, then taking them out as you fall over, everyone laughing at you, and you get into a fight.
Either way. Good times
BEER SELECTION – Beers are low on the ground but cocktails are good. Get downstairs and you could be drinking shitty water, you wouldn’t know or care. - ***
COST OF A ROUND – £15-20 - **
STAFF – Usually not enough on Fri/Sat nights. Don’t know how to serve the next customer either. - *
FOOD – None (Place doesn’t exist in the day - *
SKIRT RATIO – If you’re not gay, and you don’t leave with a girl, have a serious word with yourself and your ‘good friend’ Mike - *****
Overall - **
Verve - Leicester Sq - Brought to you by James Wormald -