It’s one thing to look for food in the gov­ern­ment quar­ter, but what a politi­co barfly wants to know is “Where can I get a decent Cham­pagne with­in crawl­ing dis­tance of Par­lia­ment?”. As DPF and Cac­tus Kate found out (stan­dard Kiwiblog warn­ing: com­ments con­tain copi­ous amounts of poo), there is noth­ing worth­while at the Back Bencher (Kate evi­dent­ly shares my lack of excite­ment for Mumm).

Apart from Maria Pia’s and Le Canard (which pre­sum­ably have fine selec­tions, but don’t count as bars), there real­ly is not much prop­er bub­bly around in Thorn­don. Fol­low­ing the Welling­ton­ista tra­di­tion of pre­fer­ring use­ful infor­ma­tion to vin­dic­tive invec­tive, after the jump I have pro­vid­ed a list, in approx­i­mate order of dis­tance from the Back Bencher, of Cham­pagne selec­tions at near­by bars and pubs.

This­tle Inn: Gos­set NV
Occi­den­tal: Lau­rent-Per­ri­er NV
Plate: Mumm NV, Moët & Chan­don NV
Trade Kitchen: Lau­rent-Per­ri­er NV (and prob­a­bly oth­ers)
Paris: two NV plus Dom Perignon

Once you get to that dis­tance, you reach Arbi­trageur and the Wine Loft, and all but the fussi­est flies should have no com­plaints at either. But that’s a fair stag­ger, and while one would not expect great things from the Back Bencher (despite the excel­lence of Cel­lar­vate), it does raise the ques­tion of why there are no prop­er bars (just pubs, cafés and restau­rants) up that end of town. Sure, the stereo­typ­i­cal grey-cardi­ganned civ­il ser­vant would have tut-tut­ted at the thought, but times are dif­fer­ent now, and I’d have thought that a Vivo- or Beau­jo­lais-style wine bar would go down very well in that locale. Per­haps some­one should buy up that old sub­sta­tion next to the MfE build­ing and turn it into a real cock­tail and wine bar, with enough choice of Cham­pers to keep even the prick­li­est cac­tus hap­py.