Eight tables, low ceiling, no gimmicks, and one of the best-regarded cocktail bars in Europe for fifteen years
Happiness Forgets is a basement under Hoxton Square with a thousand and thirty-six reviews and a 4.6, and it charges ten to twenty pounds.
There is no theatre. There is no smoke. Nothing arrives in a shoe.
There are eight tables and a low ceiling and a short list.
Which is the finding
Six postcodes. Five hundred and forty-four articles. Five hundred and forty venues.
And every single high-rated bar with a real sample has been the same three things.
A small room. A short list. Somebody behind the bar who has tasted everything on it and would like to tell you about it.
Not one was themed. Not one had a rope. Not one had a hidden door, a Prohibition premise, a Victorian explorer or a colour-changing cocktail.
Why nobody copies it
Because it cannot be bought and it does not scale.
You cannot hire somebody who genuinely knows a hundred bottles and genuinely wants to discuss them for the wage that a two-hundred-cover venue can afford to pay. The economics only work in a room with twenty seats.
And a room with twenty seats cannot pay Shoreditch rent unless the drinks are dear or the landlord is unusually kind.
Which is why every venue on this list is either small and expensive or small and unnoticed – and why the model is permanently fragile – and why the industry keeps installing ropes instead.
A rope can be fitted in an afternoon. A person who genuinely knows the list cannot be fitted at all.
The basement, one more time
The best drinking rooms in London are underground and almost none of them were built for drinking.
Coal vaults. Banking halls. Victorian public lavatories. Port cellars. Meat market vaults. A car park. A 1930s hotel basement.
And railway arches, which we wrote about at Mother Kelly’s, and which are the east London version of exactly the same rent gradient.
The industry did not choose the basement. It was sent there. And then it found out the basement was better.
The name
Which is doing something quietly clever.
It is a line about how you do not remember the good times in the same way you remember the bad ones – that happiness does not leave a mark, and that misery does, and that this is a design flaw in the human animal.
The Prat’s editorial desk has read a great many bar names in six postcodes and would like to record that this is the only one that is a proposition.
Verdict
Excellent. Book, because there are eight tables.
Ask what to drink. Drink that.
What we would tell an operator
The entire brief fits on a postcard and nobody has ever asked for it.
Buy fewer bottles. Learn all of them. Hire one person who genuinely cares and pay them properly, and let them talk. Twenty seats. No rope. Do not theme it. Do not hide the door.
You will not get rich. You will get a 4.6 across a thousand people, and a room that is full on a Tuesday in February – which is the only test that has ever mattered.
And you will still be there in fifteen years, which almost nothing in this district is.
Hanna Miller, Journalist and Philosopher
London, UK
Hannah Miller, a proud graduate of the University of Iowa’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, started her career documenting agricultural innovations and rural life in the Midwest. Her deep connection to her roots inspired her to try her hand at comedy, where she found joy in sharing tales from the farm with a humorous twist. Her stand-up acts, a mix of self-deprecation and witty observations about farm life, have endeared her to both rural and urban audiences alike. She is a four-year resident to London and the UK.
De voetnoten zijn goud waard. Verkoop ze apart.