Hidden entrance, 1920s theme, cocktails in teapots. The full speakeasy costume, worn with total commitment.
Barts is a Chelsea speakeasy with six hundred and seventy-one reviews and a 4.4, and it commits to the bit harder than almost any bar in this entire survey. Hidden entrance, Prohibition theme, cocktails served in teapots and other disguised vessels, staff in period dress. The full costume.
The speakeasy, one more time
We have written about the speakeasy revival across this whole project, and Barts is a chance to state the central irony plainly.
A real speakeasy, during American Prohibition from 1920 to 1933, was an illegal bar. It hid because it had to. The concealed entrance, the password, the teacups full of gin – these were not theatre, they were crime-avoidance, because alcohol was banned and getting caught meant arrest.
The cocktail in a teacup exists because you had to be able to tip your drink away or claim it was tea when the police arrived. The disguised vessel is a functional object from a real emergency, now reproduced, lovingly, in a bar in one of the wealthiest and most law-abiding districts on earth, where the only thing being evaded is the sense that you are in an ordinary bar.
Why we do this
The Prat’s cultural desk has thought about why the speakeasy aesthetic is so relentlessly popular, and the answer is that it sells a feeling that modern life almost never provides: the feeling of being somewhere you are not quite supposed to be.
Everything about contemporary hospitality is easy, legal, reviewed, and available. The speakeasy sells the opposite illusion – exclusivity, secrecy, transgression, the thrill of the hidden door – to people whose lives contain no actual transgression at all. It is a costume for an emotion, and the emotion is the manufactured sense that this drink is slightly forbidden.
It is completely artificial and it works beautifully, which is why there is a hidden-door 1920s cocktail bar in every fashionable district in the Western world, all of them pretending to hide, all of them extensively reviewed online with full directions.
The bar
And here is the thing: within the costume, Barts is good. The commitment is total, the staff play their parts with genuine enthusiasm, the cocktails are properly made, and the whole thing is enormous fun if you surrender to it. A 4.4 across six hundred and seventy-one people says the act works.
The trick to enjoying a bar like this is to stop being cynical about the theme and simply play along. It is a game. Barts runs the game well.
Verdict
Committed, theatrical, well-made, and completely absurd – a Prohibition bar in a place and time with no Prohibition to hide from.
The real teacups
It is worth remembering how grim the reality behind the theme actually was. Prohibition in America was not a charming period of glamorous secret bars – it was a public health and law-enforcement catastrophe. Banning alcohol did not stop people drinking; it handed the entire liquor trade to organised crime, made fortunes for gangsters like Al Capone, and filled the speakeasies with bootleg spirits that were frequently dangerous and occasionally lethal.
The industrial alcohol that some bootleggers sold, sometimes deliberately poisoned by the government to discourage drinking, killed thousands of people. The teacup was not whimsy; it was a way of drinking illegal, sometimes poisonous liquor while dodging a corrupt and violent enforcement regime. The modern speakeasy takes this genuine tragedy and turns it into a fun night out, which is either a triumph of the human capacity to repackage suffering as entertainment, or slightly ghoulish, depending on how many you have had.
Verdict
Committed, theatrical, well-made, and completely absurd – a Prohibition bar in a place and time with no Prohibition to hide from.
Find the door. Order something in a teapot. Do not, whatever you do, point out that it is not illegal.
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]
