In a time before Regaine and Robbie Williams-endorsed hair restoration, weaves, extensions and follicle lasers, there was the periwig. Louis Quatorze, upon the first signs of male-patterned baldness, donned the horse-hair wig that became the defining accessory of 17th century court culture. Across the Channel, the wig became a symbol of royal extravagance for the Roundheads, leading noted cock-end Oliver Cromwell to rail against the effeminacy and all-round gayness of court pomp.
It’s just as well everyone’s favourite ethnic cleanser pissed off before Peruke & Periwig opened, then. This four-tiered Dawson Street cocktail bar is flush with hairpieces hung as wall adornments and wallpapered with gilt-framed portraits of the gentry past in finest regalia. The premium-priced drinks menu ensures the veneer of aristocracy is more than just a schtick.
Its spiritual sisters, the Liquor Rooms and Vintage Cocktail Club, similarly strip-mine fauxstalgia for decor and ambience. While their atavism feels like a fashionable import from social histories that are not our own, there’s something more authentic (I use the term loosely) about the Georgian-inflected Peruke & Periwig set, as it is, in the shadows of the Mansion House. The fantastic romance of having been temporally transported to an alternative, hedonistic past version of the 31 Dawson Street building can be maintained.
Cocktail-making is pure theatre – rather than a circus of arbitrary gymnastics from its mixologists, though, Peruke reserves the fire-breathing for the drinks themselves. My Zombie comes topped with a slice of lime on fire, a veritable Flaming Moe, while the vial filled with R.’s Old Fashioned puffs oak chip smoke from its chimney like some lurid water bong.
Peruke, fittingly, mixes three different types of Old Fashioned. R. tries another, which tastes less like a liquid encapsulation of the first barbecue of the season, but is exemplary nonetheless. My eloquently two-toned Long Island Iced Tea does its visual effect justice. We pour some samples from the apothecary of whiskeys down our Habsburg jaws and call it quits before the school night turns into the school morning.
As a temple to vanity, Peruke attracts a somewhat preening clientele. The fiftysomethings a table up boast of their benchpress records over (delicious-looking) roast beef sandwiches, and a cloud of freshly-applied Ellnet condenses on the powder-room window. Let’s not berate the well-coiffed in their habitat, though. As the man said: “Why Go Bald?”
Peruke & Periwig
31 Dawson Street
Dublin
peruke.ie
Words: Daniel Gray / Photo: Evan Buggle
