Five stars from a single person. Three hundred and ninety-one articles. And we are going to refuse it, exactly as we refused the first.
Dan Simmonds Bar holds a 5.0 from one review.
One.
This is the last article of both surveys, and we are going to end exactly where we began, which is by refusing to accept a number.
The first article
In the very first Covent Garden batch we wrote about Nellie’s Tavern – 5.0 from a single review – and we said that the person who left it was, statistically, the most influential drinker in London.
If they had given four stars, the bar would sit on a 4.0 and rank below a Bella Italia. If they had given one, it would be, on paper, the worst bar in Britain.
They gave five. The bar lives. We should all be grateful, and slightly unnerved.
Three hundred and ninety-one articles later, here is another one, and nothing has changed.
What we did
Two hundred and ninety venues. Two postcodes. Three hundred and ninety-one articles.
And one finding, which we did not go looking for and which fell out of the data.
The star rating does not measure the venue. It measures the distance between what somebody expected when they pushed the door and what they got – and the largest single input into that is which pavement they walked in from.
We proved it seven times. Two All Bar Ones, ten minutes apart, identical menu: 4.6 and 4.5. Two Bella Italias: 4.7 and 4.5. Two Whitehall pubs, same beer: 4.7 and 4.4. Two bars in one building, same operator: 5.0 and 3.8. Three Prince of Wales pubs: 4.6, 4.4 and 4.2. The Portrait Restaurant, with the best view in London, rated four-tenths below Larry’s in the coal vault directly beneath it.
And two Be At Ones that matched exactly – which broke the pattern, and which we reported honestly, and which made the argument better.
And the formula
Which is embarrassingly simple and which almost nobody acts on.
A small room. A short list. Somebody behind the bar who has tasted everything on it and would like to tell you about it.
Every single high-rated venue with a real sample, in both surveys, was that and nothing else. Bedford Street Wines. The Clipper Lounge. Stables. Amaro. Kioku. Ricco. Opera Tavern. Plume. Baudry Greene. cato.
Not one was themed. Not one had a rope. Not one was famous.
What we found instead
A poet beaten in an alley for writing satire. A racecourse killed by mud, whose shape is now the most expensive crescents in west London. A man gibbeted on a green for trying to kill Cromwell, undone by a compliment about his horse. A department store owner shot dead by somebody who was wrong about his own father. Polar bears swimming under a stage in Leicester Square. A leg buried in Belgium with a headstone. A bear named Paddington with a refugee’s label round his neck.
None of it is on the signs. All of it is true. Every single story was sitting on a street that somebody walks down every morning.
Verdict
One review. We can tell you nothing, and we would be lying if we tried.
Go. Be the second. Ask them what to drink, and drink that.
It is the only advice this magazine has ever given, and after three hundred and ninety-one articles it is the only one we ever needed.
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]
