Two pubs, same name, same postcode, different scores – which is the experiment this magazine has been running for three hundred articles
There are two Prince of Wales pubs in this file.
One holds a 4.4 from two thousand seven hundred and eighty-four people. We wrote about it in the seventh batch, and about the three feathers on the sign that were probably not taken from a blind king at Crecy.
This one – the Townhouse – holds a 4.6 from seven hundred and thirty-eight.
Another matched pair
We have been collecting these for three hundred and seven articles and this is the sixth.
Two All Bar Ones, ten minutes apart, same menu, same training, same aprons: 4.6 and 4.5.
Two Bella Italias, same chain, same pasta: 4.7 and 4.5.
Two Whitehall pubs, same beer, same street: 4.7 and 4.4, and the difference was the walking distance to Trafalgar Square.
Two bars in the same building, same operator: 5.0 and 3.8, and the only variable was sixty-nine people.
The Portrait Restaurant, on the roof of the National Portrait Gallery, with the best view in London: 4.2. Larry’s, in the coal vault directly underneath it: 4.6.
And now two Prince of Wales pubs, in one postcode, two-tenths apart.
What explains this one
Unlike the chains, these two are not identical, and the difference is instructive rather than damning.
The big Prince of Wales is a large pub with a very large sample – two thousand seven hundred people – which means it has absorbed every bad Saturday, every broken cistern, every night the kitchen was slammed, and it carries all of that in the average forever.
The Townhouse is smaller, has rooms, has a third of the reviews, and is running the survival strategy we identified at the Hayden and the Princess Royal: beds upstairs, subsidising the bar, permitting the pub to be good rather than merely busy.
Volume punishes. Scale punishes. A big pub cannot outrun its own worst night, and a small one is only ever a few good weeks from a 4.6.
What the survey has actually found
Not that ratings are wrong. That they are answering a different question from the one you are asking.
They do not measure quality. They measure the gap between expectation and delivery – and that gap is set by the price, the crowd, the pavement outside, the weather, and the size of the room, and only very partially by anything the landlord controls.
Verdict
Very good pub, very good rooms, and a 4.6 that is real.
Go to this one. Then go to the other one, four minutes away, and see if you can taste two-tenths of a star.
What we would tell a landlord
Stop reading your reviews. Genuinely.
Not because they are worthless – they are not – but because the number at the top of them is not a report card on you, and treating it as one will make you do stupid things.
You will chase the wrong customer. You will change something that was working. You will read forty reviews about a wait at the bar and hire a barman, when the actual problem was that it rained on a Saturday and everybody came in at once and there was nowhere to put them.
The only line in any review that has ever correlated with anything, across three hundred and seven articles and two hundred and forty venues, is whether the customer named a member of staff.
That is it. That is the whole signal. Everything else is weather.
Verdict
Very good pub, very good rooms, and a 4.6 that is real.
Go to this one. Then go to the other one, four minutes away, and see if you can taste two-tenths of a star.
You cannot. Nobody can. That is the entire finding.
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]
Read this on the Piccadilly Line where someone was arguing with their phone about a parking ticket. The metaphor was almost too on-the-nose.