Bounce Bar Review (Drinking and Ping Pong together at last)
Drinking and Ping Pong – together at last
12×75.com isn’t exactly known for being a review site, despitethe fact that all of us seem to do an awful lot of eating and drinking and socialising all the time. So today I’m going to break the trend and tell you about a place that is so brilliant that it just defies belief.
To stand out in the hip London scene these days, a place needs to offer something different. So I was pretty excited about visiting Bounce Bar. You see Bounce has a USP that is a bit special. You can drink cocktails, and dine on pizza, of course, but brilliantly, you can also play ping pong. Surrounding the bar are about 30 ping pong tables and the pizza restaurant is in the back. It is like a ridiculously hedonistic youth club for grown-ups.
I loved the concept so I booked myself and a friend in for a ping pong table at midnight. We enjoyed a bottle of wine and had a few cocktails before by chance I ran into my sister and some of her work colleagues. The cocktails were flowing and by the time midnight came we were more excited about ping pong than anyone has ever been in the history of the sport (and I include ping pong enthusiasts in that).
The six of us took it in turn to play singles, doubles, round robin, and various other homemade variations of ping pong. When we used to play ping pong as kids, making up your own rules was half the fun so some of our unique takes on the sport brought back a lot of memories and kept us thoroughly entertained. And it turns out being full of cocktails and wine makes me absolutely brilliant at ping pong, who would have thought?
The rivalry was fierce, all of us were fighting for honour and the prize of not having to pay for the next drink. Table service was helpful and despite the bar being ultra-busy our waiter was always on hand and pretty speedy as well. I’m not entirely certain who won the night, but at the end of it I felt I was more than ready to take on Yoo Nam-Kyu, Jan-Ove Waldner, Liu Guoliang, Kong Linghui or even Ryu Seung-Min (You’ve got to love Wikipedia) They may be champions of table tennis but in my new sport of drunken ping pong they don’t hold a candle to me.
Great music, great ambience, great service, great food, great cocktails, and ping pong. We drank, we danced, we smashed balls around and it was the most fun night out I have had in our fair city in a long while.
But don’t take my word for it – have a look on Bounce’s website for all the details and book yourself a table. I’ll definitely be going back to Bounce, because short of finding a place that meets all of the above criteria but that pays me to drink there instead of me paying them, I don’t think there’s anywhere that can compete!
