Churchilian Winter Cocktails and the Kinks' "Sunny Afternoon"

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The bloke and I recently had an evening out to see the play "Sunny Afternoon", which was about the 1960s band the Kinks. Before the play, we enjoyed hot winter cocktails at the Hyatt Regency Churchillian above Oxford Street. The Churchill Bar at the hotel is transformed into Narnia from 'The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe' with Narnia and winter-themed cocktails for the coming weeks. The cocktails were developed in conjunction with chocolatier Green & Blacks.

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I reserved a table and was placed in the bar, but I was expecting to be placed outside on the terrace with the furry throws and hot water bottles (see the below photograph that I managed to snap from outside the building).

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However, we were placed in the hotel near the warm fire, which was not exactly the atmosphere that I was looking for to have the warm winter cocktails. Nonetheless, we were seated and we flipped through the drinks menu to choose from the list of Narnia-themed cocktails. The menu also featured various quoatations from Churchill and little drawings of cats and dogs. We were provided with olives and breadsticks.

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Some of the alcoholic drinks in the selection on offer contained small snacks, such as Turkish delight. Churchill would call these small snacks that accompanied alcohol "num nums".

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Drinks on the winter cocktail menu were called Aslan's Roar, Always Winter/Never Christmas, Beaver's Brew, the Toffee Tree, Edmund's Temptation, and the White Witch. Each cocktail is made with a different flavour of Green & Black's chocolate from lemon to dark to toffee to white.

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I had The Toffee Tree cocktail, which featured the toffee that character Polly Plummer left behind that grew into a tree. The drink came with a silver apple and small piece of fudge, which was delicious. The cocktail's glass rim was covered with green salt, and the treats and cocktail were served up on a wooden board that had an outline of the shape of a tree. Toffee chocolate, Somerset Cider Brandy, rice milk, and Antica Formula were used for the cocktail.

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The bloke ordered The White Witch cocktail, and it was made with Woodford Reserve Bourbon, milk, double cream, brown sugar, chili, ginger, and white chocolate. This was topped with foam and chocolate swirl.

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After we finished our cocktails, we walked down through Mayfair (and caught a good glimpse of Christmas lights) to get to Harold Pinter theatre not far from Trafalgar Square. The Kinks' "Sunny Afternoon" was good fun. I won't spoil it, but the play is a musical and based on the life of the band the Kinks, featuring primarily on Ray Davies. The songs from the band were used to demonstrate key events in the band's history.

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We had a table seat at the front and off to the left side of the stage, and we used an app to order a snack box for the intermission. We thought that the play was quite good, but the seats were not the most comfortable. A couple of songs were played in full at the end. I love a lot of songs by the Kinks as they have always been one of the bands I most admire from the 1960s, but I would say that "Waterloo Sunset" is probably my favourite of theirs. The play received an Olivier Award for 'best new musical' earlier this year. It is currently booking until April 2016.

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