4.9 stars, a shop licence, and the best-value glass of wine in Covent Garden by a margin that ought to be illegal
Bedford Street Wines holds a 4.9 rating – higher than every pub, bar and restaurant in this entire survey except a handful with tiny samples – and it is not, technically, a bar.
It is a wine shop. You may drink the wine in the shop. This is the whole model and it is quietly devastating.
How the trick works
A bar buys a bottle of wine and sells it to you at roughly three to four times what it paid. That multiple is not greed; it is rent, staff, glassware, insurance, licensing, and the fact that you are occupying a chair in Covent Garden for two hours.
A wine shop buys the same bottle and sells it at retail – a much thinner margin – and then, for a small corkage fee, lets you drink it standing up.
The wine is identical. The saving is enormous. The only thing you have given up is the chair, and the Prat’s economics desk would like to submit that in a city where a glass of unremarkable red now runs to fourteen pounds, the chair has become the single most overpriced piece of furniture in England.
The 4.9
A hundred and forty-one people have reviewed it, which is a real sample – not a Nellie’s Tavern situation, not a Bootlegger. A hundred and forty-one people have gone in and come out and given it, on average, four point nine stars.
This does not happen. Nothing scores 4.9 across a hundred and forty reviews. The Harp, the best pub in Britain, sits at 4.6.
The explanation, we suspect, is not that the shop is 40 per cent better than the best pub in the country. It is that the customers of a wine shop that lets you drink in it are, to a person, delighted with themselves. They have found the loophole. They are getting away with something. And nobody has ever left a bad review of a loophole.
The staff
Named repeatedly in the reviews, which is always the tell. Ask them what to drink. They will ask you two questions and then hand you something you have never heard of for eighteen pounds that would be sixty in the restaurant round the corner.
This is the actual product. Not the wine, not the corkage – the fact that somebody who genuinely knows will spend four minutes on you, without condescension, because they would rather sell you something good than something expensive.
Why there are not more of these
Because the licence is difficult, and because the economics only work at very low volume, and because the moment a shop-with-drinking becomes popular enough to need staff, chairs, a kitchen and a toilet, it has become a bar, and it must charge bar prices, and the loophole closes behind it.
The Prat has watched this happen three times in ten years in this city. A shop opens. Word spreads. It gets tables. It gets a small plates menu. Within eighteen months a glass of wine costs twelve pounds and the original customers have gone somewhere else and are being smug about a different shop.
Enjoy Bedford Street Wines now, in other words. This is the good bit. It does not last.
Verdict
The best-value drinking in Covent Garden and it is not close. Buy a bottle. Open it. Stand up. Accept that you are, in the eyes of every bar within four hundred metres, a traitor, and enjoy it enormously.
Official site: coventgarden.london
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]
