The casual sibling of the Fifth Floor Bar – a cafe and terrace perched at the top of a great Knightsbridge store
The Fifth Floor Cafe and Terrace holds a hundred and fourteen reviews and a 3.8, and it is the more casual sibling of the Fifth Floor Bar we met earlier in this survey – a cafe and open terrace at the top of a great Knightsbridge department store.
The top-of-the-store tradition
We explored, at the Fifth Floor Bar, the clever retail logic of putting a desirable destination at the very top of a department store: it draws shoppers up through every floor of merchandise to reach it, and it rewards the climb with light, views and an elevated room above the street. The Fifth Floor Cafe is part of this same ecosystem – the more relaxed, all-day, daylight counterpart to the evening bar.
The great Knightsbridge stores built these top-floor food-and-drink destinations into genuine attractions in their own right – places people visit for the cafe and the terrace as much as for the shopping. The cafe, with its terrace open to the sky, offers the daytime version of the pleasure: coffee, lunch and the view, high above the busy streets of Knightsbridge.
The terrace and the weather
The “terrace” is the key word, and it brings us back to a theme this survey has returned to repeatedly: the open-air terrace and its dependence on the British weather. We argued throughout that rooftop and terrace venues cluster at a slightly lower rating than they deserve, because they are a bet on the sky – glorious on the handful of fine days, and a disappointment when the weather does what British weather usually does.
The Fifth Floor Cafe’s terrace is subject to exactly this. On a bright, warm day, a terrace at the top of the store, open to the sky, is a genuine delight. On the many grey, cold, or wet days of the London year, the terrace is unusable and the whole proposition shrinks to an indoor cafe. The 3.8 – the lowest score in this batch – may reflect, in part, the familiar terrace penalty: visitors who came for the open-air promise and found the British sky uncooperative.
The two Fifth Floors
There is a small pleasure, for this survey, in having covered both the Fifth Floor Bar and the Fifth Floor Cafe – the evening and the daytime, the bar and the cafe, the same elevated position serving different needs at different hours. Together they show how a single well-placed top-of-store location can be worked in two registers: the sophisticated evening bar and the casual daytime cafe and terrace, sharing the same view and the same clever retail logic.
The cafe
A 3.8 from a hundred and fourteen people is a modest, middling score on a fair sample – not a disaster, but not a triumph either, and quite possibly weighed down by the terrace’s weather-dependence and the generally exacting standards applied to department-store dining. It offers the daytime pleasure of coffee and a view at the top of a great store.
Verdict
A modestly-rated top-of-store cafe and terrace, offering coffee and a view – on the days the British sky permits.
Go up on a bright day, take the terrace and the view, and enjoy the daytime, casual version of the elevated pleasure this store has sold for decades.
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]
