Two. And we have refused this number in five postcodes and six hundred articles and we are not going to stop now.
Bar Alta holds a perfect 5.0 from two reviews.
Two.
What two reviews is
It is two people.
If one of them had given four stars, this bar would sit on a 4.5. If one of them had given three, it would be on a 4.0 and would rank below a Wetherspoon.
If one had given one star, it would be on a 3.0 and would be, on paper, close to the worst bar in this survey.
They both gave five. So it is perfect, and it is displayed as perfect, on every listing site on earth, in the same font and at the same size as the Harp on Chandos Place – which is a 4.6 from three and a half thousand people and was the first London pub ever named the best in Britain.
The full ladder
Six hundred and forty-five articles and we have now seen every rung of it.
No rating at all. Charles Darwin, in Covent Garden – a bar named after natural selection, being quietly deselected by it. Inda Pubs Ltd. SiNK Pong. The Royal Exchange. And a bar in this file called, simply, secret bar.
One review. Nellie’s Tavern. Dan Simmonds Bar. Rosti Bar Limited. The Negroni Bar by Campari.
Two. This.
The dead zone – twenty to fifty – where four bad nights are fatal and cannot be outvoted. Canvas Bar, on a 3.3 from forty-seven, trapped by arithmetic that does not care whether the bar is any good.
And the real numbers. Amalfi, on a 4.8 from fifteen thousand three hundred and forty-six. Fatt Pundit, on a 4.8 from eighteen thousand. These are unfakeable, unbuyable, and immovable.
All of them are shown to you identically.
The one thing that would fix it
Print the review count at the same size as the score.
Not underneath. Not in grey. Not smaller. The same size, the same weight, the same line.
Do that, and Bar Alta stops out-ranking the best pub in Britain on the strength of two people. Do that, and Canvas Bar’s 3.3 is visibly a coin toss rather than a verdict.
It would cost nothing. It would take an afternoon.
It will never happen, because the ambiguity is worth money to somebody, and it is not worth money to you, and that is the beginning and the end of the entire review economy.
Verdict
Two reviews. Unknowable.
Go, be the third, and understand that your single opinion will move this venue’s score by more than any review you have ever left anywhere in your life.
Use it carefully
And we mean this, and it is not a joke.
Somebody has signed a lease. Somebody is paying Soho rent, which is not a small number, and is standing behind that bar tonight.
You will be one third of everything the world knows about them.
Nobody has ever had that much power over a business for the price of a drink, and the system that hands it to you does not warn you that it is doing so.
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]
My therapist said I use humor as a defense mechanism. I showed her this and she said “yes, continue that, it’s working.”