If it’s a foggy day in London town and the British Museum’s lost its charm, you may want to hoof it on over to the café in Bugatti’s Mayfair dealership to kick a few Gallic tyres. And, if you can shake loose of $60 for an espresso — we’re assuming the price is for a single, and that a double will run you $120 — you will be granted access to the sacred grove where some of the most beautiful machines on earth may be experienced as actual potentialities.

The sixty-buck dose of intensely flavored, stimulating syrup represents something of a prospect improvement for hoi polloi who have previously only experienced Bugatti a la virtuality. Before the Bugatti shot, only a black card in the wallet or a Patek Phillipe on the wrist would open sesame the Elysian landscape where Ettore’s progeny dwells and the border between the mythical and the mundane is so artfully blurred.

Ah, but a Bugatti in the actual can result in feet leaving the ground and clumsily purple prose. Apologies for that to any reader out there who gets a shiver when they come across a particularly stunning paragraph in Conrad or Faulkner; from here on out, we’ll stick to the fundamental details of the story. The café is indeed named after the brand’s grandfather — it’s called Ettore’s — as is the horsepower-delivering beverage in question: Ettore’s Shot.

Bugatti mentions that Ettore’s Shot comes in a carbon-fiber cup — not a cup the color or texture of carbon fiber, but a cup made from the very material that’s so integral to the builds of nouveau Bugatti — and that a tour ensues through the Bugatti lifestyle, from cars to furniture. The tour may even include a listen to a recording of a W16 in the throes of action on a set of the two-channel ‘Royale’ audiophile home speakers that the company introduced back in 2021.

From what we hear, it’s almost like being there.