Covent Garden’s tequila bar named itself after a Pulitzer novel about racial injustice and then simply carried on
Somebody sat in a room and said it out loud. Tequila Mockingbird. And then somebody else – and this is the part that should detain us – said yes.
Harper Lee’s novel concerns the trial of a Black man falsely accused of rape in Depression-era Alabama, and the moral education of a child watching her father lose. It is one of the most widely taught books in the English-speaking world. It has now also lent its title to a margarita bar in Covent Garden with a 4.5 rating.
In defence of the pun
We are not, in fact, going to complain about this, and here is why: the pun bar is a legitimate and ancient London tradition, and the alternative is worse.
The alternative is what happened to every other new bar on this street: a single abstract noun, in lowercase, in a sans-serif font, with no explanation. Muse. Setlist. Equus. Larry’s. Condesa. These are not names. These are the outputs of a branding workshop that cost more than the fit-out.
Tequila Mockingbird knows what it is. It has told you what it is. It has, in three words, communicated that it sells tequila, that it does not take itself seriously, and that the person who named it was pleased with themselves for a full week afterwards. That is more information than any of its neighbours will give you.
What is actually in there
Tequila, which is the correct answer. A serious agave list, mezcal, margaritas made properly rather than from a sour mix, and a room that gets extremely loud extremely early.
Ten to twenty pounds, four hundred reviews, 4.5 stars. Reviewers mention the staff. Reviewers mention the frozen margaritas. Not one single reviewer, in four hundred attempts, has mentioned Harper Lee. The Prat has checked. We went looking specifically. Nothing.
The literary bar sector, assessed
London currently supports pun bars operating on the back of at least a dozen major works of literature, and the Prat’s cultural desk has identified a clear pattern: the darker the source text, the more cheerful the bar.
Nobody has yet opened a tequila bar called The Grapes of Wrath, though the Institute for Nominative Determinism in Erith notes that it would be, in terms of actual outcomes on a Saturday night in Covent Garden, by some distance the most accurate name available.
The tequila question
Most Londoners’ relationship with tequila was established at nineteen, in a room they have chosen not to remember, involving a bottle that should not legally have been called tequila. It has taken the category twenty years to recover and it has not fully managed it.
What a bar like this is actually doing – underneath the pun, underneath the frozen margarita machine – is quiet remedial work. It is putting agave spirits in front of people who think they hate agave spirits, in a format they will accept, at a price they will pay, and it is slowly repairing the damage done by a decade of what was essentially industrial solvent with a worm in it.
That is a public service. It is being performed by a bar named after a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the American South. London is not a serious city and we should stop pretending otherwise.
Verdict
Good tequila, good margaritas, loud room, unbeatable name. Go, drink, and spare a thought for Atticus Finch, who would not have approved of any of this, and who would have been served promptly and politely anyway, because the staff here are genuinely very good.
Official site: tequilamock.com
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]
