A Turkish word for house, in a railway arch, and the category has now appeared eight times in eight postcodes
Ev Bar in Waterloo holds a 4.6 from five hundred and fifty-eight people, charges ten to fifty pounds, and it is in a railway arch.
And ev is Turkish for home.
It is not your home. Nobody lives there.
And it is the eighth venue in this survey selling exactly that.
The category
The Little Yellow Door, Notting Hill – built on the premise that it is a flatshare and you are at a house party thrown by the people who live there. A 4.7.
Home Bar, Shoreditch: 4.8.
My Place, Soho: 4.6.
Casa Tua, Camden – your house. 4.5.
Casa Manolo, on the Strand. Manolo’s house.
Back To Mine, in the City – four words that have preceded more bad decisions than any other sentence in English.
Soho Residence, which holds a 3.9, and which we said was a contradiction, because you cannot promise a welcome and station a man outside to withhold it.
And Ev.
What they are all selling
The inverse of a rope.
Every other venue in this price bracket is manufacturing exclusivity – keeping you out, hiding the door, putting a man in the cold with an earpiece, and charging you for the feeling of having been admitted.
And the home bars have inverted it completely.
They are not selling the feeling of getting in. They are selling the feeling of being invited – which is a completely different emotion, and one that London hospitality almost never offers.
The numbers say so
Home Bar: 4.8. The Little Yellow Door: 4.7. My Place: 4.6. Ev: 4.6. Casa Tua: 4.5.
Soho Residence, which put a doorman on it: 3.9.
The Lighthouse, in Shoreditch, which is a rope with a bar attached: 2.7.
Eight postcodes. Eight hundred and eleven articles. Eight hundred venues.
Every high-rated venue was a room where somebody was pleased to see you. Not one of them had a rope.
What it is actually selling
And we should say it plainly, because the category has now appeared eight times.
These bars are selling a room in a flat.
In a city where a room in a shared flat costs more per month than most people’s first car, and where the average one-bedroom rent has passed the average take-home salary, eight separate businesses have independently arrived at the idea of selling people the experience of being in somebody’s home.
And it works. It works better than anything else in the survey.
The Prat has no joke to make about this and is not going to attempt one.
Verdict
Excellent food, strong number, superb room.
The Turkish grill
Which is the actual food and which is worth being precise about.
An ocakbasi is a grill you sit around – a long charcoal trench, with the cook working over it, and the diners at the counter watching their own food cook.
Which is not a gimmick. It is the oldest restaurant format there is: the fire, and people around it.
And the charcoal matters enormously – because it produces radiant heat with no flame, and no flame means no soot and no bitterness, and the fat drips and smokes and comes back up as flavour.
The Prat has written this in three districts: you want the ember, not the fire.
Verdict
Excellent food, strong number, superb room.
Go. Somebody will be pleased to see you.
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]
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