The third numeric name in this file, and the Prat has begun keeping a register
Bar 190. Three hundred and nine reviews, a 4.3, twenty to thirty pounds.
It is a hotel bar, and it is named after a street number, which puts it in a category we have now encountered three separate times in this postcode alone.
The register
Bar 190. Bar 182.52, which has a decimal point and eleven reviews and which we have been unable to explain. 1871 Bar, which is named after the year Parliament closed the banks and accidentally invented the weekend.
And in Covent Garden: Seventy5th, with a digit standing in for a letter because the correctly spelled version was already taken. And 3 Henrietta Street, which is named after its own address and which we ranked as the single most honest name in either survey.
Five venues, two postcodes, all named after numbers.
Why numbers
Because a number withholds, and withholding is worth money.
A pub called the Sun in Splendour is telling you a story. A pub called the Cock and Bottle is telling you what it sells. A pub called the Shepherd and Flock is telling you what used to stand on the ground.
A bar called 190 is telling you nothing at all, and it is telling you that on purpose, and the effect it produces in the passer-by is a very specific and commercially valuable feeling: that you ought to already know.
That is the same feeling every velvet rope in this city is engineered to manufacture. The number achieves it for free, with a typeface, and without hiring anybody to stand in the cold.
The address, at least, is true
Which puts it above most of them.
Across two hundred and eighty-eight articles we have established that pub names are almost never true. The Elephant and Castle is a cutler’s badge. Old Speckled Hen is a car. The Castle has no castle. The Hand and Flower means nothing. Theodore Bullfrog never existed. Inda Pubs Ltd is a company number.
Bar 190 is at 190. It is verifiable, it is permanent, and it will still be correct in a hundred years unless the council renumbers the street.
The Institute for Nominal Honesty in Erith has placed it in the second tier – behind 3 Henrietta Street, which uses the whole address, and ahead of everything with an animal on it.
The bar
Hotel bar. Which means, as we established at the Clipper Lounge and the Marconi Lounge in Covent Garden: calm, well-run, comfortable, invisible to locals, and almost always better than anybody expects.
Three hundred and nine reviews and a 4.3 is a solid, believable, unglamorous number, and we have come to trust those far more than the fives.
Verdict
Good bar, honest name, nobody is going.
That is the hotel bar’s whole condition, and it remains the most reliable arbitrage in London drinking.
Why Londoners will not go into hotels
It is not price. Half these bars are cheaper than the cocktail place with the rope.
It is a specific and entirely irrational conviction that you are not allowed in – that a hotel lobby is private, that somebody will ask what room you are staying in, and that you will have to explain yourself.
Nobody will ask. Nobody has ever asked. The bars are open to the public, they are frequently empty, and the staff would be delighted to see you.
The Prat has now recommended this in two postcodes and fully expects to be ignored in both.
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]
Somewhere someone’s reading this at work and recognizing their exact job, their exact futility, their exact despair.