The Raj lives on

KIRK HARGREAVES

COLONIAL THEME: High-tea, tiger hunting and all that.

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The Bangalore Polo Club 136 Oxford Tce

Three years or so of bar reviews and never a foray into the Strip, how unpatriotic.

I had my first nightclub experience on Oxford Tce, aged 17 at Espresso 124 when it was still an excellent restaurant, bar and delicatessen trio.

They had techno music and I remember feeling elated I was in such a cool bar and petrified the police would walk in at any minute and ritually embarrass me in front of about 50 cool older people. I think I stayed about nine minutes.

In the intervening years, the Strip acquired a horrific, and deserved, reputation. It was a fighty, lurching, seething mass of young drunkards for years - and I avoided it like the plague. It seems to be coming back good.

The advent of SOL Square and the Manchester St bars has diverted many of the foul youth, and, coupled with a better class of bar, the Strip is becoming quite pleasant again. The Tap Room, where my brother was the manager, was one of the first to raise the tone and several have followed including, now, The Bangalore Polo Club.

In the old Viaduct and DiLusso spot, the Polo Club fitout is something to be seen. It's a themed and back-storyed bar in the style of Cleaners Only at SOL Square, but the attention to detail and the brio to carry it off so completely sets it apart.

As one of the bartenders said to me: "It's like SOL Square with a budget." There's an extensive history about a 19th Century Indian polo club and the menu references the glorious colonial past of the Raj and high-tea and tiger hunting and all that.

The giant portraits in the plush dining area and the white cloth turbine-style fans in the main bar were the two features among the many lush furnishings that stuck in my mind.

While fantastically executed, the theme still struck me as a strange choice. The colonial period had some beautiful trappings, sure, but it was still basically the (often brutal) subjugation of entire nations. Jolly good show, what?

Perhaps we're past that all now and it's fine to Disney-fy it, but I know of a few post-colonial intellectual pointy-heads who would disagree. While I was thinking about all this I spotted an Indian couple having dinner there. I was probably reading too much into it, but I wondered how they saw the whole thing. Was their experience like African- Americans visiting one of those vintage Southern cotton plantation estates - "Nice house, but. . ."

Luckily, our colonial past is far behind us.

Politics aside, the Bangalore Polo Club has outdone itself and the bar looks great. They are a DB bar which I don't particularly like - many of their beers having a slight acrid after- taste for mine - but they have taken the best on offer and have the delicious Erdinger wheat beer on tap. There's also a beer called Badger's Piss that ties in with their theme somehow, but I wasn't brave enough. The wine list has a wide range from $7.50 a glass to $20 a glass (a pinot) and beyond. I noted they had a chardonnay for $156 and several bottles of red over $200.

The staff were very friendly and happy to talk us through the place. I didn't get to eat, but I'll definitely be back for the pea soup with baby minted peas, egg, truffle and crispy bacon. Sounds royal.

IAN STEWARD

- © Fairfax NZ News