El Vino
Sir: 'Peregrine', whose acidulous egocentricities have further enlivened your pages of late, recently did less than justice to El Vino, Fleet Street's best establishment for serious imbibers. Were he often to see Mr David Mitchell
behind the bar he could rightly complain that his duties as an MP were being neglected — which they emphatically Are not. However, Mr Christopher IVIitMell is to be found with great regularity attending to the requirements of El Vino patrons, amongst which I am happy to have been included since 1933. Further, cannot peregrine relish the fact that women are excluded from the bar itself: how rare are such masculine preserves in DiMilon? Women have always been adinietPd'to the rear portion, where, seated,"t2ny may decorously drink with the men as equals — and there is no discrimination against them if they wish to buy a round! Incidentally, it is not generally remembered that the Octave drinking habit, now archaic, originated in El Vino under the redoubtable Frank Bower's dictatorship. It consisted of ingesting in fairly rapid succession eight dock glasses (six to the bottle) of contrasting sherries.
John Doxat 8 Palace Place Mansions, Kensington Court, London
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