Three branches, three postcodes, one menu – and the numbers have moved again, exactly as they always do
This is the third All Bar One in this survey.
Covent Garden: 4.5 from five thousand two hundred and twenty-seven.
Villiers Street: 4.6 from three thousand four hundred.
And this one, in the City: 4.6 from seventeen hundred and sixteen.
The experiment nobody designed
We have been running this since the first batch and it is the central argument of the entire survey.
Every variable that a restaurant group controls is held constant. The menu is printed centrally. The wine is bought centrally. The training, the aprons, the blond wood, the brunch – identical, deliberately, at enormous expense, because consistency is the whole product.
And the scores differ.
Which means the number is not measuring the bar. It cannot be. The bar is the same bar.
The full table, four postcodes deep
Two All Bar Ones in Covent Garden: 4.5 and 4.6.
Two Bella Italias: 4.7 and 4.5.
Two Whitehall pubs serving the same beer: 4.7 and 4.4 – and the only variable was the walking distance to Trafalgar Square.
Two bars in the same building, same operator: 5.0 and 3.8, and the only variable was sixty-nine people.
Three Prince of Wales pubs: 4.6, 4.4 and 4.2.
Three Simmons bars: 4.8, 4.7 and 4.7.
The Portrait Restaurant, with the best view in London, on the roof of the National Portrait Gallery: 4.2. Larry’s, in the coal vault directly underneath it: 4.6.
And two Be At Ones in Covent Garden that matched exactly, at 4.6 and 4.6 – which broke the pattern, and which we reported honestly, and which forced us to downgrade a law into a tendency.
Why the City branch scores well
Because of who is in it.
A City All Bar One is not catching tourists. It is catching the same four hundred people, from the same offices, at the same time, every single day – and they know exactly what an All Bar One is, and they are getting exactly that, and the gap between expectation and delivery is approximately zero.
Which is our whole theory. The rating measures that gap. It has never measured anything else.
And the Covent Garden branch, on a piazza full of exhausted tourists who have been overcharged all afternoon, is measuring a different gap entirely – and it is being punished for a mood that was formed two hours before anybody pushed the door.
Verdict
It is an All Bar One. You know precisely what it is.
And it is doing better here than in Covent Garden, for reasons that have nothing to do with it, and everything to do with who walks past.
What a chain cannot buy
Every pound All Bar One spends on standardisation is a pound spent making the product identical.
And the product being identical is precisely what proves that the rating is measuring something else – because if the bar is the same and the number is not, then the number is not about the bar.
It is the cleanest experiment in the entire survey and nobody designed it. A national chain ran it, by accident, over twenty years, at enormous expense, in the course of trying to do the exact opposite.
The bar
Ten to forty pounds. Blond wood. Brunch. You have been in one. You will be in one again.
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]
