Six letters, no meaning, and it is the newest naming category and it is winning everywhere
Bantof holds a 4.8 from nineteen hundred and thirty-seven people, charges twenty to seventy pounds, and it is one of the best-rated venues in Soho.
And the name is not a word.
The invented name
It is not English. It is not Italian, Spanish, French or Latin. It is not an acronym and it is not, as far as we can establish, a place, a person or a thing.
It is six letters, arranged so that they are pronounceable, memorable, and – crucially – available.
And we predicted this. At Bar 182.52, two hundred articles ago, the Institute for Nominal Exhaustion in Erith forecast that within a decade the majority of new London bars would be named after strings that have never appeared in any language.
Hux, in Notting Hill, is three letters and means nothing.
Goldwood, in the City, is two nouns pushed together.
And Bantof is the pure form: a sound, made up, owned by nobody.
Why it wins
Because it clears the only three hurdles that matter.
It is available as a domain, because it is not a real word. It is trademarkable, for the same reason. And it cannot be wrong.
We have spent five hundred and sixty-nine articles taking names apart. The Elephant and Castle is a cutler’s badge and not a Spanish princess. The Churchill Arms was named forty-eight years before Winston was born. Old Speckled Hen is a car. Nickel is a goblin. The Green Man was named in 1939. Kaldi’s goats appear in 1671.
Every one of them made a claim. Every one of them could be checked. Almost every one turned out to be false.
Bantof makes no claim. There is nothing there to check.
Is it worse
Honestly, no – and we have come round to this and it has taken five postcodes.
A name that means nothing is not lying to you. It is not claiming a princess it does not have, or a hen that was a car, or a fifteen-inch alley that is thirty-three.
And a pub name is not a claim. It is a handle. It exists so that one person can tell another where to meet, and the only requirement is that both of them know which building is meant.
Bantof does that perfectly.
The 4.8
Which is what actually matters, on nineteen hundred people, which is a serious sample.
And it was not achieved by the name. It never is. It was achieved in the room, by people who are good at this, and every single thing we have found in five postcodes says the same.
Verdict
What actually produces a 4.8
Not the name. Never the name.
Five postcodes, four hundred and seventy venues, and every single high-rated room has been the same thing: a small space, a short list, and somebody behind the bar who has tasted everything on it and would like to talk about it.
Not one was themed. Not one had a rope. Not one had a hidden door.
And the industry keeps installing ropes and inventing compound nouns, because a rope can be fitted in an afternoon and a name can be registered in ten minutes, and a person who genuinely knows the list cannot be bought at all.
Verdict
Excellent bar. Meaningless name. It does not matter in the slightest.
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]
