There's a moment with every Lost Estate show where you peek behind the curtain and enter a brilliantly realised world.
The build up is always exciting. First a title and suggested dress code; then as you travel to their base in a former West Kensington factory you start to spot other folk who look like they may be in for a night of music, theatre, and fabulous food and drink.
This time they are spiriting you back to the absinthe-soaked birth of cabaret at Montmartre's Chat Noir.
Bustles, bohemian attire, and velvet tailcoats are optional but you are greeted the door with an invitation and guided down a corridor full of sepia photographs that set the scene for 1896.
Within moments you are swept into a room that spins you back 130 years to a venue that Toulouse Lautrec and Degas might recognise - complete with low-lit booths, black waistcoated waiters and Belle Epoque decor.
Past Lost Estate shows have included a Sherlock Holmes mystery, and their popular annual Dickensian feast based on A Christmas Carol.
The elements are the same; Top class musicians playing live in front of and around the audience, inventive cocktails - mine had Gin, Pineau blanc, Framboise, Citron, Absinthe, and Parfum de rose - and a quality three course dinner under the watchful eye of exec chef Ash Clarke.
Then there's the show. Here our bibulous host is impresario Rodolphe Salis (a charismatic Joe Morrow) inviting us into his bohemian Montmartre club and encouraging us to break free from society and indulge in a little drink and debauchery.
There's Pierrot miming a tale of lost love with an overcoat, a trilling opera singer, a magician performing card and vanishing tricks, and sinuous dancer Coco Belle
Le Chat Noir kicked off the cabaret genre with audiences dining and drinking while watching a variety show. It's the perfect setting for an immersive feast - between acts we're served cocktails and a basket of bread, with pate, cornichons, saucisson and pickles.
Then comes a refined version of coq au vin with pommes purees, and finally a rich lemon curd tart.
The venue was part avant-garde art salon, part rowdy music hall and The Lost Estate brilliantly capture it all with three acts based on art, absinthe and anarchy.
The piece de resistance comes between the first two when the aniseed flavoured liquor arrives at your table with the ritual of dripping water over sugar cubes to balance the bitterness.
It's followed on stage by a hallucinogenic fever dream in which all performers go into pie-eyed slow-mo courtesy of the green fairy.
The post meal spell is soon broke and the pace picks up with a rousing, madcap finale that includes a brilliant, belting rendition of Bizet's Carmen, and of course the Can Can.
The actual Chat Noir closed in 1897, shortly after Salis's death and this extraordinary, heady night out recreates a memorable feeling of partying at the end of the world.
Chat Noir by The Lost Estate is booking now with tickets starting at £129.85 at chatnoirlondon.com. Nearest tube West Kensington.
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