Fifty-three people have been to a bar called Memory, and every single one of them gave it five stars
Fifty-three people have reviewed the bar. Every one of them gave it five stars. It holds a perfect 5.0.
A bar called Memory, with a flawless record, remembered perfectly by fifty-three people and by nobody else at all.
The word
Kioku is not nostalgia. It is not sentiment. It is the plain, functional word for the faculty – the thing that stores and retrieves, the mechanism rather than the mood.
Which makes it a considerably better bar name than it first appears, because what a bar is actually selling, underneath the drinks and the room and the lighting, is a memory. That is the product. Nobody remembers the cocktail. They remember the evening, and the bar has been engineered – the low light, the music, the shape of the room – to make the evening store well.
And then, with grim reliability, the same establishment sells you the substance that degrades the storage.
The Prat’s neuroscience desk has confirmed that alcohol directly interferes with the formation of long-term memory, and that a bar is therefore a machine for producing an experience and simultaneously corroding the record of it, and that this is the central and unremarked joke of the entire industry.
The perfect 5.0, assessed properly
We have been rigorous about this all series and we are not going to stop now.
Fifty-three is a real sample. Not one, like Nellie’s Tavern. Not three, like Upper Gods. Fifty-three people, each of whom made an independent decision, and every single one of them landed on five.
It is not the ninety-four of Permission Lounge, but it is well past the point where the Prat’s statistics desk is prepared to wave it away. Something is happening in that room.
Sake, properly, one more time
We said it at Moto and we will say it here: cold, or room temperature. Not hot. Not in a beer. Not as a shot.
The rice is polished, sometimes to under half its original size, over days. It is inoculated with koji, brewed, pressed, aged. It is one of the most labour-intensive alcoholic drinks made anywhere on earth, and it arrives in front of you at around fifteen per cent, which is a strong wine and not a spirit.
Sip it. Ask the staff. They will tell you. That is what they are for and it is why the bar is on a 5.0.
The Japanese bar, and why the ratings are always high
Look across this survey. Kioku: 5.0. Moto: 4.6. The Japanese venues in this dataset rate consistently, unusually high, and there is a reason, and it is not mystique.
It is that they are small, and they are staffed by people who have decided to know one thing extremely well, and they will tell you about it if you ask and leave you alone if you do not.
That is the entire formula. It is not complicated. It is not proprietary. It requires no theming, no rope, no colour-changing anything, and no stuffed hound.
Every bar in this postcode could do it tomorrow. Almost none of them will, because it does not scale, and because a room that seats twenty and employs somebody who genuinely knows the list cannot pay Covent Garden rent, and because the thing that makes it good is precisely the thing that makes it commercially fragile.
Verdict
A perfect record, a real sample, a serious list, and a name that means the one thing the drink will take from you.
Go. Drink carefully. Try to keep it.
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]
