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PCO: Our Venue in Focus

PCO of a Different Kind

Remember that feeling of déjà vu, when you enter a place for the first time, and realize you belong there perhaps in your dreams? (If you dream you’re part of a flapper movie, of course, like we like to do from time to time). In the pleasant white-washed corridors of Vasant Vihar’s neighbourhood market is a very conspicuous vintage phone box (we missed a red phone booth sorely till we entered and found restrooms fashioned after them). A prospective customer is required to punch in a secret code ‘yes, we played out our Secret Seven fantasies’ for the door to open.

A vanilla-cream scent wafts along as you climb the chairs to come up upon pouffy Victorian-cream-and-roses armchairs and a bar with gleaming crystal decanters and bowls of fruits in front of rows of bottles await you. Definitely a place to orchestrate your love story, if we’ve seen one. Heading straight for the bar, we order a couple of Old Fashioneds and a White Lady. (We highly recommend you to do the same, the best Old Fashioned we’ve had in the city). The latter is said to have been invented by Harry Mc Elhone in 1919, the famous bartender of yore with formidable bartending skills, who had served the likes of Hemingway, Coco Chanel and Jack Dempsey, and whose bar is a Parisian landmark.

The Old Fashioned not only comes in a hurricane glass, all muscular next to the dainty white lady in a martini glass, but also packs in a punch. Yes, Mad Men innuendos galore as you sit and casually sip it, scoping out the bar while Ella Fitzgerald’s voice floats in leisurely from somewhere. Conversely, you could be Fred Leiser the British spy from John Le Carre’s The Looking Glass War. Role play is the key to the night.

You might even want to move into their private room, or what looks like a study from the 1940s, and have your whispered interludes, or a raucous night out with company. The food on the menu is mostly meant to be munched upon along with the drinks; the owners of the place tell us how they wanted to set up a neighbourhood bar for one of their favourite neighbourhoods. We however, choose to move downstairs to the wine cellar. (Yes, they have a real one). The different spaces inside PCO are completely different in character and you could spend the same evening three ways, with different people, and different conversations.

PCO at D 6, D Block, Vasant Vihar, call 26062444 for reservations and password.

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