Named after the cheapest seats in a theatre, rated accordingly, and yet the view is genuinely excellent
In a theatre, “the gods” are the highest seats – the cheap ones, up under the roof, from which the actors are the size of thumbs and the air is noticeably warmer. To sit in the gods is to have got in, but only just.
The Gods Rooftop Bar has named itself after the cheap seats, and it holds a 3.8 rating from seventy-two people, and the Prat would like to note that this is the most honest piece of branding in Covent Garden.
The 3.8
It is not a disaster. A 3.8 is not a two. A 3.8 is the score of a place that is fine, and that people expected to be more than fine, and the gap between those two positions is where the missing star went.
Reading the reviews, the shape is unmistakable. Nobody says the view is bad – the view is universally praised. Nobody says the drinks are undrinkable. What people say is that they queued, that it was smaller than the photographs, that it was cold, and that the whole thing cost more than they had budgeted for.
These are not complaints about a bar. These are complaints about a rooftop.
The rooftop problem, stated plainly
London is not a rooftop city. This has to be said, because an entire hospitality sector has been constructed on the pretence that it is.
We have, generously, forty evenings a year on which sitting outside at altitude in this city is a pleasure rather than an endurance event. The rest of the time it is between four and eleven degrees, there is a wind coming off the river that was not in the promotional photograph, and you are paying a fifteen per cent premium for the privilege of being cold above the ground rather than warm underneath it.
The Institute for Elevated Hospitality in Thamesmead has calculated that the average London rooftop bar is at its advertised temperature for eleven per cent of its opening hours, and that customer satisfaction tracks external weather with a correlation so tight that the bar’s actual quality is, statistically, a rounding error.
The Gods is not badly run. The Gods is on a roof, in London, and has been rated by seventy-two people, of whom perhaps eight were warm.
The view, in fairness
Genuinely good. That is the whole product and the bar has delivered it. On one of the forty evenings, with the light going and a drink in your hand and the rooftops of Covent Garden laid out below, the Gods is worth every penny and the 3.8 looks like an injustice.
On the other three hundred and twenty-five, it is a windy balcony.
The seventy-two
It is worth dwelling on the sample size, because it tells you something the rating does not. Seventy-two reviews is nothing. The pub at the bottom of the same street has four thousand.
A rooftop bar with seventy-two reviews is a rooftop bar that people are not finding, or not returning to, and in central London those two facts tend to arrive together. The Gods is not being punished by the crowd. The Gods is being ignored by it, which over time is considerably more dangerous.
What would fix it
Heat. That is the entire answer and everybody involved knows it. The rooftop bars that thrive in this city are the ones that gave up on the fantasy of the Mediterranean terrace and installed enough outdoor heating to be visible from space. They are environmentally indefensible and they are packed every night of the year, and there is a lesson in that which nobody wants to say out loud.
Verdict
Check the forecast. Genuinely, actually check it. This is the only bar in London where the weather app is a more useful review than the reviews, and where a 3.8 tells you almost nothing except that it rained on most of the people who went.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
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