(Photo Tipsy Bar Facebook page)
Located on the first floor of a quiet residential building in Maadi, Tipsy Bar recently opened as a bar and a space for live music, offering an extensive range of cocktails and a host of international dishes as well as a full sushi menu.
The place is decorated in a kitsch 80s style that immediately makes you feel like you stepped into a Mohandessin music studio in the early Mubarak days. Because it is located in a quiet residential building, the effort to ensure the place does not disturb the leafy neighbourhood has paid off. Barely any sound can be heard from outside, despite a live band playing inside.
This quietness comes at the cost of ventilation; however, and the bar’s poor air circulation means non-smokers will have a very hard time staying inside without having to go outside periodically to get some much needed fresh air.
When we visited Tipsy Bar, Like Jelly was about to play. A safe choice, given how popular they are, and the band played some of their well-known songs in new remixes to a very enthusiastic and mixed crowd. Because we had heard the songs so many times already, we found the performance slightly underwhelming. For those who have not heard them as much, however, their inventive songs will go a long way.
Tipsy Bar’s menu offers a great range of cocktails with tongue in cheek names, like “He didn’t call back”. While their food menu only offers a few main courses from the international dishes section, their sushi menu more than made up for any lack of options.
The biggest problem with Tipsy Bar, besides its poor ventilation, was its service and prices. Though everything looked reasonably priced compared to other bars in the upper range, there was a service and tax charge that was not added to prices on the menu but located at the bottom in small print. While Tipsy Bar is certainly not alone in doing this, we still thought it to be in bad taste, given that their original prices aren’t cheap to begin with.
The service presented a much bigger problem. The waiters would conveniently forget to bring back your change several times or pretend there wasn’t any. Then they proceeded to give different prices to different people. At one point a waiter told us a beer cost this much then erred, revised his statement and gave us a new price.
While its location gives it an edge, because currently, not many bars offer live music in the same vicinity, your experience at Tipsy Bar will depend too much on the service you might get. The bar has good food and drinks but is overpriced, poorly ventilated and the waiters actively and shamelessly try to rip you off. However, if you are OK with calling out the waiters on their conveniently weak memories, you might be able to enjoy a night of good live music at Tipsy Bar in Maadi.
