Be At One Regent Street Review: The Fourth One, and Now We Have a Curve

4.6, 4.6, 4.3 and 4.5 – and the spread is exactly what the sample sizes predict

This is the fourth Be At One in this survey.

Russell Street, Covent Garden: 4.6 from two thousand one hundred and forty-one.

The Lyceum, Covent Garden: 4.6 from fourteen hundred and eighty.

Monument, in the City: 4.3 from fourteen hundred and two.

And Regent Street, Soho: 4.5 from four thousand five hundred and forty-four.

The arc

We should lay this out honestly, because it has been a genuine argument with ourselves across three postcodes.

We began by claiming that identical products produce different scores, and we proved it six times.

Then we found two Be At Ones that matched exactly – and we reported it, and we downgraded our law to a tendency, and we said we were grateful.

Then we found a third at 4.3, and we said the pattern was restored, and that the two matching branches had been an illustration of the mechanism rather than a refutation of it.

And now a fourth, at 4.5, on the largest sample of the four.

What the four of them say

The two Covent Garden branches match because they are four minutes apart, both in the theatre district, both catching the same crowd doing the same thing.

The City branch is three-tenths lower because the City is a completely different animal – four good hours a day, two dead days a week, and a crowd of people who have been at a desk since eight.

And Soho sits between them, on the largest sample, which is exactly where a very large, very busy branch in a mixed district should sit – because volume punishes, and four and a half thousand reviews is four and a half thousand chances to have had a bad night.

Every one of those numbers is explained by the pavement and the sample. None of them is explained by the drinks, which are made from the same recipe by people who did the same training.

The finding, five postcodes deep

Eleven matched sets now. Three All Bar Ones. Three Simmons – the tightest spread we have measured. Four Be At Ones. Two Cocktail Clubs. Two Bootleggers, one on a 5.0 from twenty-two people and one on a 4.3 from five hundred and twenty-six, which are the same bar.

Two Bella Italias. Two Whitehall pubs serving the same beer. Two bars in the same building at 5.0 and 3.8. Three Prince of Wales pubs.

The star rating does not measure the venue. It measures the gap between what somebody expected and what they got, and the biggest inputs are the pavement outside, the price on the door, and how many people have already been through it.

Verdict

Good cocktails, fair price, loud room, and a chain that has spent five postcodes accidentally proving this magazine’s central argument.

What we would tell a chain

Your branches will never match, and it is not your fault.

You can standardise the recipe, the training, the glassware and the apron. You cannot standardise the street outside, the price of the flat next door, or the mood of the four hundred people who walk past at six.

And the number is measuring them, not you.

The most consistent chain in this survey is Simmons, at 4.8, 4.7 and 4.7 across ten thousand people – and it achieved that not by being more standardised, but by promising less and clearing it every time.

Verdict

Good cocktails, fair price, loud room, and a chain that has spent five postcodes accidentally proving this magazine’s central argument.

We are, once again, grateful.

Alan Nafzger

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]