Sixty reviews, a 4.6, and a five-star hotel bar that most Londoners will walk past their entire lives without entering
The Berkeley Bar and Terrace sits inside the Berkeley, one of London’s grand five-star hotels in Knightsbridge, with sixty reviews and a 4.6, and it is the purest example in this Chelsea survey of a phenomenon we have tracked across the whole project: the great hotel bar that the city walks past.
The invisible bar
A hotel bar is, to most Londoners, invisible. There is a psychological barrier at the door of a grand hotel – the doorman, the lobby, the sense that this is a place for guests and not for you – and it stops the overwhelming majority of people from ever going in.
This is almost entirely an illusion. The bar of a five-star hotel is, with very rare exceptions, open to anyone who walks in and orders a drink. You do not need to be a guest. You do not need to book. You need only the nerve to walk through a lobby as though you belong there, which is a skill that costs nothing and that almost nobody exercises.
The result is that some of the best-made drinks in London are served in beautiful, calm, half-empty rooms, to the tiny minority who have worked out that the door is not actually locked.
The sixty
Sixty reviews, which by the standards this survey has applied for a hundred and thirty articles is a small sample, and normally we would treat a 4.6 across sixty people with caution.
But a hotel bar’s low review count is not a sign of failure – it is a sign of exactly the invisibility we have just described. The people drinking here are hotel guests, who do not review, and the handful of Londoners in the know, who do not want the secret out. A quiet, excellent hotel bar generates almost no reviews precisely because it is quiet and excellent and known only to a few.
What you are paying for
Not cheap. Obviously not cheap. This is a Knightsbridge five-star hotel and the drinks are priced accordingly.
What you are buying is the room, the calm, the space, and the skill – a proper bar, properly staffed, in a setting designed to make you feel that the outside world has been temporarily suspended. That is worth a great deal to a certain kind of person on a certain kind of evening, and it is completely wasted on everyone else.
Verdict
Beautiful, calm, expensive, and hidden in plain sight behind a door most Londoners are too intimidated to open.
The Berkeley itself
The hotel is worth knowing about. The Berkeley is one of a small group of grand London hotels – alongside Claridge’s and the Connaught – that represent the top tier of the city’s hospitality, with a history going back to the nineteenth century and a reputation built over generations.
Its bars and restaurants have long been destinations in their own right, and the hotel is known for its style and its clientele. This is the world of the American Bar at the Savoy and the Connaught Bar – rooms where the cocktail is treated as a serious craft and the setting is designed to make an ordinary evening feel like an occasion. The prices reflect all of this, and so, generally, does the quality.
Verdict
Beautiful, calm, expensive, and hidden in plain sight behind a door most Londoners are too intimidated to open.
Walk in as though you own the place. Order one perfect drink. The door was never locked.
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]
My dad’s been in London since the 60s. He says it has captured the moment when London institutions stopped pretending to serve residents.