The Spirits: A slice with your drink sir?

Richard Godwin's cocktail adventures take him to a ping pong bar in Holborn...
bounce bar Pic: Graham Jepson
Graham Jepson
7 May 2013

Ping-pong is suddenly the new whatever the last new thing was. Gourmet hot dogs? Seventies trouser suits? Cocktails?

There are tables in parks, tables in bars, tables in the offices of new media start-ups. There is a table by Turnpike Lane where youths compete fiercely, and another on London Fields where hipsters compete unfiercely. It might be Boris Johnson’s greatest achievement as Mayor of London. Remember his “Wiff-Waff’s coming home” speech after the Beijing Olympics?

The craze has reached a commercial highpoint with the opening of Bounce, a ping-pong parlour-cum-cocktail bar. It occupies an impressively large basement near Chancery Lane, in the very building where “Ping Pong” was patented by the Jaques company. There are 17 tables, which you can hire from £10 an hour, plus dim lighting, distressed décor, an enormous bar and a large restaurant. The idea is to treat table tennis as if it were tenpin bowling, and it is already proving a popular. On average, a stray ball lands in someone’s Gin Fizz every 23 minutes.

In Bleak House, Charles Dickens describes the young lawyers in this part of town, “tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls of words”. On a recent weeknight, their tipsy descendants were tripping one another up with slices and smashes. They were tripping us up, too. We had reserved the Olympic table, which was used at London 2012, though I don’t remember Zhang Jike and Li Xiaoxia clearing a space among an office party when they served.

For a long-time devotee of the sport, all this clamour inspires mixed feelings. Bounce is well designed. The bats are excellent quality and the balls are plentiful. The soundtrack is loud and good: Bob Dylan, The Who, and so on. The cocktail list is witty (the “Ping Pong Show”, featuring tequila and lemongrass, will amuse anyone who has been to the bad bit of Bangkok), while the food is refreshingly grown-up (antipasti and pizzas). Still, it’s a bit like when your favourite obscure band suddenly scores a hit. You are pleased that your passion is finally recognised, but you feel everyone is missing the point.

The point of my visit was to get one over my dear old friend James, whose hyper-competitive nature rarely brings out the best in me. I hoped that his recently dislocated shoulder might allow me press home an advantage in our decades-long rivalry. After preliminaries, however, I was finding it hard to concentrate. I had been sipping a Gin Lane Spritz, a house variation on the refreshing Venetian aperitif, but it blurred the edges that I wished to sharpen.

If you play table tennis at a municipal leisure centre or in a friend’s basement, the only noise is the hypnotising “pock” of the ball. Ideally, it lulls you towards Ping-Pong Zen, a state of heightened consciousness where you and your adversary almost become collaborators in a swift, sharp ballet. When Dylan is sneering “How does it FEEEYYYYLLL?”, this is hard to do. When you step back and tread on the foot of a lawyer, who seems surprised, EVEN THOUGH YOU SPECIFICALLY WARNED HER TO GET OUT OF THE WAY, it is frustrating.

After a gin martini eye-opener, however, I entered a very different zone. If you count the frolicking lawyers on the adjacent table as part of the game, then suddenly, dodging them becomes exhilarating. A deft backhand slice accompanied by a Pete Townshend guitar flourish feels pretty neat, too. If you don’t take your table tennis too seriously, then, Bounce is a lot of fun. So much fun, in fact, that you might forget to win.

Bounce, 121 High Holborn, EC1 (020 3657 6525; bouncelondon.com)

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