Covent Garden’s smallest serious cocktail bar has a 4.9 rating, and a capacity problem that is doing all the work
Dovetail Bar holds a 4.9 out of 5 across more than four hundred reviews. In Covent Garden – a postcode where cynicism is the local dialect and every third venue is a chain pretending not to be – this is close to a miracle.
It also has sixteen seats.
The seats are the strategy
This is not a criticism. It is, we suspect, the entire business plan. A bar with sixteen seats cannot have a bad night in the way that a bar with two hundred seats can have a bad night. Nobody is ever waiting at the far end of a crowded room, catching nobody’s eye, slowly composing a two-star review in their head. There is no far end. The staff can see every single person in the building without turning around.
The result is a review page that reads like a fan letter. Bartenders are named. Tim, the owner, is named repeatedly, with the affection normally reserved for a favourite uncle. One reviewer, reaching for a way to explain that Dovetail improves on classic cocktails rather than mangling them, arrived at the comparison that most bars twisting a classic produce the equivalent of a Weird Al Yankovic song – fun, and worse. It is the single best line ever written about cocktail bars and it was left on a review site for free.
Finding it
The entrance is not an entrance so much as a rumour. You are looking for stairs. The stairs are attached to a Chinese restaurant. Depending on which of the bar’s several online identities you believe, you are going up to the second floor of RedFarm on Russell Street, or down into a basement on Henrietta Street, and the correct answer is that Dovetail has occupied more than one address and the internet has never caught up.
This is a Covent Garden speciality. The area contains at least a dozen bars whose listed address is a building they have not been inside for two years, and the listings will not be corrected, because a bar that is hard to find is a hidden gem, and a hidden gem gets 4.9 stars.
The drinks
Genuinely good. A pina colada built with dulce de leche and sweet sherry. A rum and coke served crystal clear, which is a piece of showing off that requires a fat-wash, a clarification, and roughly forty minutes of prep for a drink that is, structurally, a rum and coke. There is a Hawaiian street food offer alongside, which nobody asked for and everybody finishes.
Prices sit at ten to twenty pounds, which for the West End is not merely reasonable but faintly suspicious. The Institute for Cocktail Economics in Leyton has flagged Dovetail as an outlier and requested an audit.
The Bramble warning
Reviewers keep issuing it, independently, unprompted, in different words: the Bramble is dangerous. There are, apparently, a few units in that one. We pass this on without comment, other than to note that when four separate strangers on the public internet warn you about the same drink, they are not being funny. They are survivors.
Verdict
Book. Do not turn up. There are sixteen seats and roughly nine million people in London and you are not special. Book, arrive early, get a stool at the bar, and let them talk you through the list, which is what they are there for and what they are extremely good at.
Official site: dovetailbars.co.uk.
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]
