Basil's Bar & Brasserie

Every hotel bar tells you what its hotel thinks of itself. The Gleneagles' bar said two things at once: the designer furniture and champagne list said boutique, and the name over the door — Basil's — said the hotel had finally learned to laugh about the most famous thing that ever happened to it.

From Tropicana to Basil's

For years the hotel's bar traded as the Tropicana — a name straight from the golden age of British seaside optimism, when every lounge with a palm tree and a cocktail shaker reached for the tropics. The boutique relaunch retired the palm-print era and rebuilt the room, but the masterstroke was the renaming. Basil's Bar & Brasserie put the hotel's Fawlty Towers inheritance on the menu for the first time — affectionately, and on the hotel's own terms. (As with the restaurant next door, the old name survives in this page's web address: the archive preserves the original tropicana-bar URL exactly.)

The Room

The relaunched bar lounge was, in the hotel's words, "designed and stylised by a top designer" — the showpiece of the whole refurbishment. It worked as the hotel's all-day room: light lunches through the afternoon, then the slow turn towards evening — an early cocktail, a chilled glass of champagne — as the light changed over the bay. The adjoining conservatory was the prize seat: by day it framed what the hotel called "stunning views of the Devon coastline and the blue waters of Torbay," and guests learned to claim its wicker chairs early.

The Brasserie

The "brasserie" half of the name was earned. Basil's ran its own kitchen rhythm alongside Anstey's Restaurant — simpler plates, generous hours, and the long-running two-for-one main course offer that became a fixture of the hotel's final years. Add the afternoon teas served through the lounge and the room rarely sat idle between breakfast and the last nightcap.

A Bar With a Sense of Humour

The name was never just a gag; it was confidence. By the 2010s the hotel had spent four decades alternately embracing and deflecting its sitcom shadow — the history page of its own website insisted the new Gleneagles bore "little if no resemblance" to Fawlty Towers, while the bar downstairs cheerfully poured measures under Basil's name and the tribute dinner weekends filled the diary. Visitors hoping for rudeness at the bar were, by every account, disappointed: the service culture was the anti-Basil, and proudly so.

When the hotel closed in 2015, Torquay lost one of its more knowing rooms. The bay's bar scene continues to flourish — the English Riviera's official guide keeps the current list — but no cocktail lounge in Devon will ever again be named, with such perfect double meaning, after a man who once thrashed a car with a tree branch.

The Cocktail Hour

The English seaside cocktail hour is its own institution, and Basil's kept it faithfully. From six o'clock the room performed its slow ritual: the first guests down from their balconies, dressed for dinner a shade more formally than strictly required; the barman's opening clatter of ice; the day's sailing and walking compared and improved upon. The champagne list did respectable business — anniversaries being a seaside hotel's bread and butter — but the room's true speciality was the unhurried single cocktail before dinner, taken in the conservatory while the bay turned pewter and the lights of the fishing boats came out along the horizon. No app, no playlist, no rush. Whatever the decade did to hotel bars elsewhere, the cocktail hour at the Gleneagles stayed defiantly, perfectly 1959.