The second perfect score in this district on a sample that is starting to mean something, and we cannot explain it
Finley’s holds a perfect 5.0 from eighty-seven people and charges ten to twenty pounds.
And we have spent six postcodes refusing exactly this, so we have to deal with it honestly.
What we have been saying
That a 5.0 is a rumour and not a rating.
Nellie’s Tavern: 5.0 from one person. Bar Alta: 5.0 from two. Fire Bar: 5.0 from two.
The Bootlegger in Covent Garden: a perfect 5.0 from twenty-two people – and its sister branch in the City, same chain, same concept, holds a 4.3 from five hundred and twenty-six.
Same bar. The 5.0 was not better. It had less evidence.
Eighty-seven
Which is not a rumour and is not yet a verdict.
It is enough that somebody should have had a bad night. Eighty-seven separate evenings, eighty-seven people with their own moods and their own reasons for being out.
And in six postcodes and six hundred and thirty-four articles, we have found exactly two venues holding a perfect score on a sample above fifty.
The Bourbon, in this district: 5.0 from a hundred and sixty-nine.
And this.
The honest possibilities
It is extraordinary, and eighty-seven people all thought so, and it is a small cheap room where somebody is doing the job properly.
Or it is asking – a polite prompt at the end of an evening, to a customer who has had a nice time, which converts at a genuinely significant rate and which selects, gently, for the people who enjoyed themselves.
That is not fraud. Every large operator in this survey is doing it, and the ones with the biggest samples are doing it best.
The Prat cannot distinguish between these from here and is not going to pretend otherwise.
What we can say
It is small. It is cheap. It is a wine bar, which means it is doing one thing.
Small room. Short list. Somebody who knows.
Six postcodes. Six hundred and thirty-four articles. Six hundred venues.
It has never once failed.
Verdict
Go, be the eighty-eighth, and find out.
And if it is not perfect, you will have done something eighty-seven people could not.
What asking actually does
Because we should be precise about the mechanism, rather than insinuating.
A venue that asks every satisfied customer to leave a review is not fabricating anything. The reviews are real. The people are real. The evenings happened.
What it is doing is changing who reviews.
Left alone, the people who write reviews unprompted skew towards the extremes – the delighted and the furious, with the large mass of people who had a perfectly nice time saying nothing at all.
Ask, and you capture the middle. And the middle, on a good night, gives you five stars.
It is the cheapest legitimate intervention in the entire industry, and the venues with the best numbers are, almost without exception, doing it.
And the small independent bar with a genuinely excellent room, run by two people who are exhausted, is not doing it – because they are busy, and because asking feels like begging, and because nobody has ever told them it is the single highest-return four seconds available to them.
Ask. At the end. When they are happy. It is not undignified and it is not cheating.
Gute Satire lässt dich lachen, dann unbehaglich werden und anschließend über dein eigenes Unbehagen lachen.
My mum’s been in London since the 50s. She recognizes every neighborhood reference and that recognition terrifies her about what we’ve become.