Butcher Bar, Liverpool Street

Right now, I’m working in Piccadilly. Going home from work at the end of the day often necessitates going through Leicester Square. At least once a week, there is a premiere of the latest film which means a prolonged detour due to the erected barricades and troupes of bib-clad stewards shepherding us proles the long way round the square. Whether it’s the artificially created hoopla engulfing Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa, Rush, or even Run For Your Wife, it’s often quite the spectacle. However, the recent premiere of the One Direction film took it to a whole new level.

On the Monday of the screening, increasing numbers of besotted Directioners had been camping out, putting the finishing touches on their signs and gushing to television cameras about their love of the group. Walking past them and seeing their gleeful, giddy faces, it might have been easy to sneer at their fanatical devotion that bordered on untempered zealotry. Until I remembered that I feel exactly the same way about Vivek Singh.

For the unenlightened amongst you, Vivek Singh is the man behind the Cinnamon restaurants (Kitchen, Club and Soho). He applies Indian fine dining techniques to English food. One example of this is his rogan josh shepherd’s pie at Cinnamon Soho. Whenever he comes up with something new, I get the same light-headedness and repeated internal susurrations of ‘Oh my god, oh my god’ that is shared by Directioners. Fortunately for me, I don’t have to camp out.

Singh’s new venture is the Butcher Bar at Anise, a den of carnivorous delights, with everything from the fittings to the cocktails feeling like it was stripped from the bone. My companion was unsure about what to make of it, and particularly when he saw the cocktail menu. ‘Bacon-infused whisky? Beetroot rum?’ I responded to his bewilderment with a stern look and harshly whispered ‘This is Vivek Singh and you will respect that!’

The bacon-infused whisky was in The Buffalo Butcher, a sort of Whiskey Mary with the addition of a crispy pig’s ear. The use of whisky counterbalanced the sharpness of the tomato juice but didn’t quite have the smoothness you might hope for. The beetroot-infused rum was one of the ingredients in the Bloody Beetroot Daquiri. It was curious and took a while to relax into. But once I did, I realised that this might be the best, albeit very wrong, way to get children to eat their vegetables.

‘You finish those carrots young man!’

‘No! Don’t want to!’

‘Well what if I infuse them in vodka and use that to make a Carrot Cosmpolitan?’

‘Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyy!’

The bar also offers bar snacks but this is Vivek Singh, so these are no peanuts and bombay mix, they are Cinnamon Cuts. My companion and I took a selection of venison and prune kofta balls, Desi pork ribs, Kolkata chicken wings and Bhangra sausages. The Cuts were so tremendous in their own way that my companion and I got into an argument about which was the best.

‘It’s the sausages. They’re perfectly formed and the plethora of flavours is almost too much.’

‘What are you talking about? It’s the kofta balls. Prune and venison. It’s an unbelievable combination.’

‘You idiot! These chicken wings have a marinade that came from the gods!’

‘Fool, you complete fool! The pork ribs are so good that I would happily eat the shit that these make. They’re that good.’

When it came down to it, we couldn’t decide. The evening finished amicably with both of us conceding that the Butcher Bar is just too damn fine to argue over. He headed back to East Finchley whilst I went home and stroked the Vivek Singh poster that is on my wall.