A side hustle is a second job. We have given it a cheerful name and stopped asking why anybody needs one.
Side Hustle holds a 4.7 from five hundred and thirty-four people, charges twenty to seventy pounds, and is one of the better cocktail bars in Covent Garden.
And its name is a phrase that has, in about fifteen years, completely changed what it means to have a second job.
What it used to be called
Moonlighting. Which sounds furtive, because it was – it implied you were doing something your employer did not know about, in hours you were supposed to be resting.
Or simply: a second job. Which sounds like what it is, which is a person who cannot live on the first one.
And then somebody called it a side hustle, and the entire tone changed.
A hustle is enterprising. A hustle is something you choose. A hustle is a person with drive, monetising a passion, building something – and it is spoken about with genuine enthusiasm by people who are, in a very great many cases, simply working two jobs because one does not cover the rent.
The rebranding of necessity
We have watched language do this in both surveys and it is never accidental.
Speakeasy once meant a bar you could be arrested in. It now means a bar with a rope.
Artisan meant made by hand by a skilled person. It now means made in a factory in a slightly smaller batch.
Craft meant a small independent brewer. It now means one of four multinationals.
Wild meant not farmed. It now means farmed.
And a second job, taken by somebody who needs the money, is now a side hustle, taken by an entrepreneur.
The Institute for Linguistic Drift in Erith has stated the rule and we have never found an exception: when a word for a hardship becomes a word for an opportunity, somebody has stopped paying for something.
Who works in the bars
Since we are here, and since the name invites it.
The people making your drink in this postcode are, in a large proportion of cases, doing exactly what the sign says. Actors between jobs. Musicians. Students. People with a day job and a rent that requires two.
The London hospitality trade is substantially staffed by people who are hustling on the side of something else, and the industry knows it, and it is priced in.
The bar
Which is, infuriatingly, excellent – fresh, sharp drinks, a proper list, and a 4.7 across a real sample.
Small room. Short list. Somebody who knows. It has never failed once in three hundred and sixty-six articles.
Verdict
Superb drinks, uncomfortable name.
Go, order something, and tip the person who made it, because there is a decent chance this is not their only job.
The service charge, one last time
Twelve and a half per cent, discretionary, added automatically, removable only by saying so out loud, at the table, to a person who has just spent two hours being pleasant to you.
It is one of the most elegantly coercive mechanisms in British commercial life, and everybody involved understands it perfectly, and nobody says it.
Pay it. And know that the law on where it goes changed recently and the practice has not entirely caught up, and that in a great many rooms in this postcode the person who served you sees considerably less of it than you assume.
Dr. Ingrid Gustafsson holds a Ph.D. in Literary Studies and serves as Professor of Literature and Satirical Journalism at the university. Her scholarly work focuses on contemporary satire as a form of institutional critique, examining how exaggeration, irony, and absurdism function as sophisticated analytical tools for exposing structural inequality and institutional hypocrisy. Dr. Gustafsson has published extensively on the genealogy of satirical discourse, the relationship between speech acts and cultural power, and satire’s role as both aesthetic practice and epistemological strategy. Her research interrogates how contemporary satire operates within celebrity culture, legal systems, and institutional rhetoric, revealing the mechanisms through which power obscures itself through language and performance. Dr. Gustafsson’s work combines rigorous textual analysis with broader cultural theory, contributing significantly to understanding satire’s critical function in contemporary society.
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