Burleigh Street’s theatre basement has been running the same open secret since 1977 and would like you to keep it quiet
Joe Allen has been in a basement off the Strand since 1977. It is a New York theatre restaurant transplanted whole – brick walls, posters of West End shows that closed, a piano, low light, and a room that does not properly come alive until half past ten.
It also, famously, does not have a burger on the menu. It sells a great many burgers. It has been selling them for decades. It just does not write them down.
The open secret
You have to ask. That is the whole mechanism. The burger exists, it has always existed, everybody knows it exists, and it is not printed, and to obtain one you must be the sort of person who knows to ask for it.
What this creates – and it is a piece of hospitality engineering of real genius – is a two-tier room. There are the people who ordered from the menu. And there are the people who did not. And the second group can identify each other, and feel a small warm glow of belonging, and the restaurant has manufactured this feeling for nothing, using only the absence of a line of text.
The Prat’s dining desk has confirmed that the burger is good but not transcendent, and that this is entirely beside the point, because you are not eating a burger. You are eating an initiation.
The theatre crowd, properly
Every restaurant in this survey claims a theatre clientele. Most of them mean that people eat there before a show.
Joe Allen means the other thing. It means that at eleven o’clock at night, when the audiences have gone home to Sevenoaks, the people who were on the stage come down the stairs, and they eat, and they drink, and somebody sits at the piano, and it goes on later than it should.
This is a genuinely different kind of room and there are almost none of them left. Fourteen hundred people have reviewed it and given it a 4.3, and the reviews from tourists complain about the lighting, and the reviews from the trade do not mention the lighting at all, because they are not there to see anything.
The prices
Thirty to eighty pounds. It is not cheap and it has never pretended to be. What you are buying, at the top of that range, is a table in a room where the person next to you was, ninety minutes ago, singing.
The posters
They are all failures. This is the detail nobody points out and it is the best thing in the room.
The walls of Joe Allen are hung with posters from West End and Broadway productions, and the tradition – inherited from the New York original – is that the shows commemorated are the ones that closed. The flops. The three-week disasters. The vehicles that were going to make somebody a star and did not.
So the actors eating downstairs at eleven at night are surrounded, on every wall, by the documented remains of other people’s catastrophes. It is either the cruellest interior design decision in London or the kindest, and after two visits the Prat has concluded it is the kindest, because the message is unmistakable: it happens to everyone, it happened here, and we are still open.
Verdict
Go late. Go after ten. Order the thing that is not on the menu. And when the piano starts, do not, under any circumstances, look at whoever is playing it, because looking is how you become a tourist, and everybody down here has agreed not to be.
Official site: joeallen.co.uk
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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