The ninth matched pair in this survey, and the number has moved again, and it has nothing to do with the drinks
There are two Cocktail Clubs in the City file.
Near Monument: 4.5 from fifteen hundred and fifty-nine people.
Near Mansion House: 4.7 from three hundred and ninety-two.
Two-tenths of a star apart. Same chain. Same list. Same training. Eight minutes’ walk.
The matched pairs
This is the ninth in four postcodes, and the table is now long enough to be evidence rather than anecdote.
Two All Bar Ones in Covent Garden: 4.5 and 4.6. A third in the City: 4.6.
Two Bella Italias: 4.7 and 4.5.
Two Whitehall pubs serving the same beer on the same street: 4.7 and 4.4.
Two bars in the same building, same operator, same night: 5.0 and 3.8 – and the only variable was sixty-nine people.
Three Prince of Wales pubs: 4.6, 4.4, 4.2.
Three Simmons bars: 4.8, 4.7, 4.7.
The Portrait Restaurant, best view in London: 4.2. Larry’s, in the coal vault directly underneath: 4.6.
And two Be At Ones in Covent Garden that matched exactly, at 4.6 and 4.6, which broke the pattern and which we reported honestly and which forced us to downgrade a law into a tendency.
Why the smaller one wins
Because it is smaller. That is the whole answer and we have found it every single time.
Fifteen hundred reviews means fifteen hundred separate evenings, and somewhere in that number there was a bad Saturday, a broken cistern, a night the ice machine failed, and a member of staff who was having the worst week of their life.
All of it is in the average, permanently.
Three hundred and ninety-two reviews has absorbed a fraction of that. It has not been open long enough, or busy enough, to accumulate its own worst nights.
Volume punishes. It has punished every single large venue in this survey and it will punish this one.
What the number is actually measuring
Four hundred and eighty-three articles, four postcodes, three hundred and fifty venues, and one finding.
The star rating does not measure the venue. It measures the gap between what somebody expected when they pushed the door and what they got – and the biggest inputs into that gap are the pavement outside, the price on the door, and how many other people have already been through it.
The landlord controls almost none of it.
The bar
Loud, cheap, fun, and honest about it. Ten to twenty pounds. The drinks are decent and nobody is going to make you feel stupid for ordering wrongly, which we have argued in four postcodes is worth more than any cocktail.
Verdict
Good bar. Go to the Mansion House one if you want the better number.
You will not taste the difference. Nobody can. That is the entire finding.
What we would tell a landlord
Stop reading your reviews.
Not because they are worthless – they are not – but because the number at the top of them is not a report card on you, and treating it as one will make you do stupid things.
You will chase the wrong customer. You will change something that was working. You will read forty complaints about a wait at the bar and hire a barman, when the actual problem was that it rained on a Saturday and everybody came in at once.
The only line in any review that has ever correlated with anything, across four hundred and eighty-three articles and three hundred and fifty venues, is whether the customer named a member of staff.
That is the whole signal. Everything else is weather.
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]
