It should be Americain. It is not. And it has been like that in the listing for years.
Bar Amercain. Look at it.
It should be Bar Americain – the French for American bar – and there is an I missing.
One thousand and seventy people have reviewed it, and it holds a 4.6, and nobody appears to have said anything.
The typo tier
We have been collecting these across five postcodes and the collection is now substantial.
Te lion y unicorn, in Covent Garden – the royal coat of arms with the definite article amputated and the conjunction rendered, inexplicably, in Spanish. No rating.
ORIANI (Leadenhall ), in the City – with a trailing space before the bracket, permanently.
Seventy5th – a digit where a letter should be, because the correctly spelled version was registered by somebody else.
BNB Cafe and Bar Ltd Butter Bakery Bar and Cafe – nine words and a Ltd, which is two names welded together.
And Bar Amercain, which is missing a vowel.
Why nobody fixes it
Because the owner does not know, and because nobody has told them.
A business listing is created once, in four minutes, by somebody doing eleven other things – and it is then never looked at again by the person who owns the business, who assumes it is correct.
And it is, meanwhile, the single most-read piece of text about that business in existence. It is on every map. It is the first thing several thousand people a year will ever see.
Read your own listing. Once. Out loud. It takes four minutes and it is the highest-return four minutes available to any hospitality business in Britain.
What the bar actually is
And this matters, because it is magnificent.
It is part of Brasserie Zedel – which is in a basement off Piccadilly, in a vast, gilded, mirrored Art Deco dining room that was built as a hotel restaurant in the 1930s and rediscovered essentially intact.
It is one of the most beautiful rooms in London. And it is one of the cheapest serious restaurants in the West End, deliberately – the prix fixe is a genuinely startling price for what it is and where it is.
The bar next to it does proper cocktails, has live cabaret, and is doing all of this underneath Piccadilly Circus for ten to fifty pounds.
The vault, again
Five postcodes, and the finding has not changed: the best rooms in London are underground, and none of them were built for drinking.
Coal vaults. Banking halls. Victorian lavatories. Port cellars. Meat market vaults. And a 1930s hotel basement off Piccadilly.
Verdict
Superb room, superb value, and a missing letter.
Go. And somebody, please, tell them about the I.
Why Zedel is cheap
Because it was a decision, and it is worth explaining, because nobody does this.
The room is enormous – several hundred covers – and it is in a basement, which is the cheapest space in any building.
And the operators made a deliberate choice to price the food low and fill the room, rather than price it high and fill it half.
Volume, in a room that size, with a kitchen that is cooking a small number of dishes very well, works. And it produces something that essentially does not exist anywhere else in the West End: a genuinely grand dining room that an ordinary person can afford to eat in.
The Prat’s economics desk regards this as the single most public-spirited decision in London hospitality.
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]
