A 6’2”-tall ice maiden — literally, she’s been sculpted out of ice — welcomes you into the bar at the Ice Lounge. Saree clad, hands folded in a traditional namaskar, she occupies pride of place in the ‘ante-room’, a dark corridor leading from the lounge area at the front where the temperature is maintained at a constant zero-degree centigrade so as to acclimatise visitors to the bar to the even lower temperatures inside.
Welcome to Ice Lounge at the MGF Metropolitan mall in Saket, New Delhi, which opened in January this year and claims to be India’s only “authentic ice bar”. There’s another one in Mumbai called 21 Fahrenheit, which opened late last year. Ice bars are cool places to chill out, literally speaking. Made entirely of ice, visitors must wear insulated capes, hand-gloves and Moon Boots if they aren’t to freeze to death.
The wall, bar-stools and cruiser tables, counter, dispensers, glasses — everything at the Ice Lounge is made of crystal clear ice. The interiors draw inspiration from Mughal architecture. There’s a throne, an ice ‘curtain’ leading to an ice couch and more ice sculptures — a peacock and a tiger’s family, and a bas relief on the wall of the Taj Mahal in snow and green paint.
The temperature inside is a steady -10 degree centigrade. A sophisticated insulation system and five-layered flooring ensure that the ice doesn’t melt even during eight-hour power cuts. The lights inside are provided by special LED lamps which don’t emit heat. The light is refracted through the clear ice emitting different colours —- blue or red — giving the bar a psychedelic feel.
Puneet Tayal and Kanav Chaddha, the owners, got Julian Bayley, the architect and designer renowned the world over for his ice constructions and carvings, to create Ice Lounge. Iceculture, Bayley's company, is one of the leading names in the ice hospitality business today, having done prestigious projects such as the inauguration party for President Barack Obama in Washington, a 2,000-block ice maze (now in the record books) for General Motors at the Toronto Auto Show, Elton John’s annual charity event in Britain and for Al Gore’s 2007 Nobel Prize acceptance in Oslo, for which they moulded blocks of ice into a melting Earth to depict global warming. Bayley is now working on creating a Toronto cityscape design for the upcoming G20 conference in Toronto.
Iceculture has also done ice bars all over the world, from Dubai, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Spain and Portugal, to Thailand and the US. For Thailand’s Bar Ice Samui, they made a ‘wallpaper’ with embedded orchids and a life-scale Tuk Tuk taxi strong enough to sit on. Bayley has a team of researchers and designers back in Ontario who explore ice and its properties, and have designed a number of exclusive products that have now become the company’s signature — the ice curtain and the ice portrait made of ice, snow and food-colours such as used to make the Taj Mahal bas-relief sculpture in Delhi.
Iceculture headquartered in Ontario uses water from the Great Lakes filtered through a reverse osmosis system to make the blocks of crystal clear ice, which are then carved into ice sculptures. Thirty tonnes of these blocks imported from Canada were used in Ice Lounge, 10 of them going into just one of the tigers you see at the bar in Delhi.
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“We start with the ice blocks and our design department goes to work, consulting with the client about the space available, the theme, and so on,” says Bayley. The sculptures and other design elements are produced in the studio in Canada before being shipped to the customer. “We send a crew to set up the bar,” Bayley finishes.
It might not seem so, but making ice sculptures is a combination of high technology and delicate craftsmanship. Once the ice blocks are ready, computer-monitored wooden router machines are used to cut them precisely, spin and carve them into various shapes or corporate logos. Iceculture has also introduced the ice lathe and other power tools and accessories to the industry.
An ice lounge is all about the ‘ice experience’, says Bayley — “drinking the cocktail in an ice glass, being served over an ice counter, sitting down for a souvenir photograph, a quick look round, and then exit, hardly extending beyond 35 minutes at the most.”
And for Rs 1,000, the fee they charge for entry at the Ice Lounge (there’s a complimentary glass of vodka thrown in), it’s evident a lot of heatstruck Delhiwallahs like the experience. No wonder Bayley is now thinking of setting up a few more ice lounges in India, and even an ice manufacturing unit.
Info: www.iceloungeindia.com