A pub that has promised, in its own name, to be uneventful – which is either brave or a warning
The Quiet Night Inn. Three hundred and thirty-nine reviews, a 4.1, ten to twenty pounds.
And a name that is doing something no other venue in either of these surveys has attempted, which is to promise, on the sign, in advance, that nothing is going to happen.
The anti-promise
Every other bar in this city is selling an event. It is selling a night, an experience, a story you will tell. The names announce it: the Society of Exploration. Paradise. Trailer Happiness. Blame Gloria.
And here is a pub which has looked at all of that and said: no. Come in. Sit down. Nothing will occur.
The Prat’s marketing desk regards this as either the most confident piece of positioning in west London or a very quiet cry for help, and after considerable discussion has been unable to decide.
The pun, ranked
We have now assembled a substantial collection of these and it is time to be rigorous.
Tequila Mockingbird, in Covent Garden, is the reigning champion – three words, two pieces of information, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about racial injustice conscripted into the service of a margarita bar.
The Stranded, on the Strand, is a geographic pun with a hidden second meaning about commuters, and it is better than it looks.
The Quiet Night Inn is a homophone pun – inn for in – which is the lowest form of the art and the one every pub in Britain has reached for at some point.
But it earns its place because the joke is load-bearing. The name is not decoration; it is a description of the product. It ranks, in the Institute for Nominal Honesty’s final table, alongside the Cock and Bottle and 3 Henrietta Street: a name that tells the customer exactly what they are buying.
What a quiet pub actually is
It is an endangered thing and it should be said plainly.
A quiet pub has no music, or very little. It has no screens showing sport, or one, in a corner, muted. It has chairs you can hear across. It does not have a queue, a rope, a concept, a small plates menu, or a person on the door with an earpiece.
It is the default state of the British pub as it existed for four hundred years, and it has become, in a city like this one, a specialist product that has to be advertised.
Verdict
A local, doing what a local does, and honest enough to put it on the sign.
Go on a Tuesday. Nothing will happen. That is the entire offer and it is being under-served across the whole of London.
The 4.1, defended
It is not a high score and it does not need to be.
Read the reviews and there is no anger in them. Nobody is furious. There is no story about a door, no rope, no bottle-service ambush, none of the things that we established in Covent Garden are what actually destroy a rating.
There is just a lot of “fine,” and “nice enough,” and “our local,” and one man who thought the carpet had seen better days.
A 4.1 built entirely out of mild contentment is a completely different object from a 4.1 built out of disappointment, and no listing site in the world will ever show you the difference.
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]
