Two hundred and eighty-eight people, and there are forty good evenings in a London year
Elondi holds a 4.7 from two hundred and eighty-eight reviews, charges twenty to fifty pounds, and it has a terrace.
Which makes it the twenty-fifth outdoor venue in this survey – and it has beaten the cluster, which almost none of them do.
The cluster
Eight postcodes. Twelve hundred and seventy-one articles.
The Gods: 3.8. Radio Rooftop: 3.8. John Lewis Roof Fest: 3.4.
Queen of Hoxton: 4.0. Skylon: 4.1. AMANO: 4.1. Savage Garden: 4.1.
And GONG, on the fifty-second floor of the Shard – the highest bar in Western Europe – 4.1.
Fifteen of twenty-five at 4.2 or below.
It is not the altitude
Which GONG proves beyond any argument.
Because GONG is as high as it gets – three hundred metres, the best view in London – and it holds a 4.1, level with a bar above a shop on Oxford Street.
It is expectation.
Because a terrace in this country is not selling a bar.
It is selling a memory of somewhere else – a terrace in Rome at eight in the evening, with the heat still coming off the stone.
And then they arrive, in April, with a wind that was not in the photograph.
There are perhaps forty evenings in a London year on which sitting outside is unambiguously pleasant.
Forty, out of three hundred and sixty-five. It is a bad bet, and everybody keeps making it.
The three escapes
And there are only three, and twenty-five venues have now tested it.
Walls. The weather cannot get in and therefore cannot cost anything. Bokan: 4.5. The Terrace: 4.5.
Spectacle. A view so overwhelming it overrides a bad evening. Madison: 4.5.
Price. Netil360: 4.5, at a third of the money.
Shelter, spectacle, or cheapness. There is no fourth answer.
And a small sample helps
Which is the honest caveat.
Two hundred and eighty-eight is a real number – but it is a young number, and a young venue has not yet collected its own worst evenings.
Every additional customer is another chance to have a bad night, and the bad nights never leave.
What we would tell them
Stop selling the summer. Put the heaters on the website. Put the rain on the glass and somebody perfectly warm behind it.
It is free. It would work. Nobody will do it.
Verdict
And the igloo is the honest answer
Which is worth saying once more.
Because an igloo does not pretend to be the Mediterranean.
It is a plastic dome, in England, in the rain, with a heater in it – and it says, without embarrassment: it is cold out here, and we have made it warm, and you can see the sky.
Which is precisely what London actually wants.
London does not want a terrace. London wants to be warm and to be able to pretend it is outside.
Everybody in the trade knows this and almost nobody will say it.
It is environmentally indefensible – you are heating the outdoors – and it is full every night for four months of the year, and there is a waiting list.
The customer has spoken very clearly. The industry is still selling them a photograph of Rome.
Verdict
Excellent, strong number. Check the forecast anyway.
Staff Writer at The London Prat
Somewhere a council director is reading this thinking “is this how we actually sound?” The answer is yes and they’ve always known it.
The precision about London governance is almost hostile. Every observation earned, every neighborhood detail researched, every footnote justified.