Indie bar with best-named cocktail is a safe bet.. just ask Belle and Sebastian
The story goes that American tourists were visiting the city, mistook the chalk board showing the results of the pub quiz for the cocktail list and ordered three Partick Swayzes.
And so the best-named cocktail paying tribute to one of the city’s most-famous boroughs and a sadly departed Dirty Dancing actor was born.
Pub Spy happens to know that the cocktail ’s roots can be traced back to a Big Issue journalist’s skill for word-play several years ago.
The linguist no longer lives in the country but his movie star cocktail survives, if maybe more Thornwood than Hollywood.
Pub Spy cal led in to The Sparkle Horse, itself named after an American indie rock band, on a Friday night.
We nabbed a table for two in the corner of this traditional-style bar, which is bigger than it first seems, being split over three levels, and ordered up a couple of fish suppers.
No point nagging about the service – it’s apt that this place is named after a horse. The plates came to the table so swiftly that they could have been on the back of Red Rum.
Partick Cross is well renowned for boozers, with folky favourite Lismor and fitba stalwart The Dolphin long-popular choices for a session.
And while The Sparkle Horse might have had something of the everyman vibe about it when it was the Dowanhill Bar, these days the clientele is the selfaware artsy cognoscenti of, cough, lower Hyndland.
On the ground f loor of a residential corner tenement block, those visiting Americans would no doubt call this place a “neighbourhood” bar.
It’s the sort of place where everyone seems to know each other – and Belle and Sebastian.
The indie darlings of the west end are regulars, according to local lore, so look out for them at the pub quiz on a Monday. Patrick
Swayze might have had the time of his life but let’s not overplay things here. Perhaps what makes this comfortably tatty gaff stand apart from its rambunctious neighbours is the safe- space vibe going on for folk who might consider themselves on the margins of the mainstream.
Look around. There’s a spirit of Jock Tamson among the alternative bohemia. And that makes this horse a horse worth backing.