CityBird: Volupté

The City’s answer to afternoon tea was never going to be salubrious. Volupté, cabaret venue behind Chancery Lane station, is a shining example: it’s taken sandwiches and scones (which, admittedly, The Dorchester does better) and thrown in nipple tassles and glitter. 

One otherwise flat Saturday afternoon, IT guy and I found ourselves round the backstreets of High Holborn, searching for London’s quirkiest supperclub. Volupté has turned the recent institution of afternoon tea into a decadent burlesque cabaret event – boobs and cucumber sandwiches sit side-by-side.

Usually to be found in an overly glitzy area such as Soho, Volupté is trying its luck with City types – and good news, it’s just in time for a pre-Christmas blow-out. We eventually find it, tucked between two offices opposite a dreary staff car park, but the atmosphere inside is far from bleak: there’s a buzzing bar upstairs, filled with groups of young women dressed as flapper girls, dripping with feathers and beads. (FYI, we wore jeans and jumpers. Error.)

It’s downstairs where the nipple tassles happen though. An intimate cove becomes a grotto with Christmas tree, tinsel and lashings of glitter. It’s the same effect of being covered in glue and being pushed headfirst through M&S’s festive section. At 3pm, guests are seated with plates of thinly-cut, no-crust sandwiches: roast beef and horseradish, ham and mustard and salmon and cream cheese. It’s accompanied with a glass of cava and a choice of tea in quaint floral teapots.

Amber Topaz, Diva Hollywood, Beatrix Von Bourbon and Gateaux Vivant make up the cabaret entertainment – IT guy looked awkward throughout, so ladies, take your girlfriends along to this one – complete with pasties, feathers, glitterballs and cheese-wire esque suspenders, which they then proceed to take of/throw at the audience/eat.

Two hours later, we’d overdosed on Earl Grey, prosecco, gingerbread cakes and voyeurism. And with a finishing time of only 5pm – it gives you the entire evening to while away in a Holborn pub. Christmas, booze and casual nudity just about sums the Square Mile’s take on the Queen’s favourite tradition.