Eastbourne Cocktail Club, Eastbourne

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The Greenhouse is a distant memory as the Eastbourne Cocktail Club (ECC) now resides at 10 Station Street. As an exile of the Big Smoke the ECC has been on my radar since reading that it has been designed to ‘bring the flavour of London to Eastbourne’. Having been a resident of Camden for many years I appreciated the attempt at recreating a NW1 bar. However, the grime, police sirens, moody bouncers, crazy bus drivers, unhinged youths and smell of Ganga were all lacking when I visited on Thursday evening last week.
Being a cocktail bar all manner of spirits are available for the mixologists to do their magic. These spirits line lit shelves that run along the length of the back bar that is decorated with framed front pages of Rolling Stone magazine. For those that think that fruit should be reserved for animals and athletes there is a range of keg products available. These included Heineken, Amstel and Caledonian Brewery’s Three Hop alongside Strongbow Cloudy Apple and Rekorderlig ciders. A chalkboard advertises burger and chips for £5 with the option of adding things such as cheese, bacon, pineapple and avocado for an extra £1 per item. Tapas were also advertised and other foods may be available.
To recreate the London look the owners have hung ‘Camden Town’ and ‘London Calling’ street signs. The bar on the right hand wall faces basic four seater tables that look like they were knocked up in the local woodwork college. Dumb and Dumber and Quadrophenia prints on a couple of the tables added to the ‘cool bar’ theme.
During my stay varying genres of music were playing from the 1960s to the 1980s. There are no televisual devices so live sport is not shown.
At the rear are a few steps up to what was once the backyard. This area has been turned into a small covered seating area, toilet and small kitchen. For some reason there is fake grass on the floor of the seating area and both of the urinals in the toilet are encased by canoes that stretch from the floor to the ceiling.
There is a second bar upstairs that I have never visited. There are plans to turn this area into REHAB which will be somewhere you ‘could imagine Amy Winehouse hanging out’. The ECC website stresses that this will be a bar and not a crack den.
Within minutes of me and the wife settling on one of the uncomfortable stools at the bar a couple of blokes started squaring up to each other. In the end they decided not to kick off, which was good because we would have left and missed out on a very good evening. I found the service to be friendly and thought the ECC to be a vast improvement on the Greenhouse that I last visited in August 2009. I would have no problem returning here for a few more jars.

On 13^th April 2016 - rating: 7
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